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The Foundation of the Unconscious Schelling Freud and
the Birth of the Modern Psyche 1st Edition Matt Ffytche
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Matt Ffytche
ISBN(s): 9780521766494, 0521766494
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.91 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english
 MATT FFYTCHE

The Foundation
of the
UNCONSCIOUS
Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the
Modern Psyche

CAMBRIDGE
The Foundation of the Unconscious

The unconscious, cornerstone of psychoanalysis, was a key twentieth-

century concept and retains an enormous influence on psychological
and cultural theory. Yet there is a surprising lack of investigation into
its roots in the critical philosophy and Romantic psychology of the
early nineteenth century, long before Freud. Why did the uncon-
scious emerge as such a powerful idea? And why at that point? This
interdisciplinary study breaks new ground in tracing the emergence of
the unconscious through the work of philosopher Friedrich Schelling,
examining his association with Romantic psychologists, anthropolo-
gists and theorists of nature. It sets out the beginnings of a neglected
tradition of the unconscious psyche and proposes a compelling new
argument: that the unconscious develops from the modern need to
theorise individual independence. The book assesses the impact
of this tradition on psychoanalysis itself, re-reading Freud's The
Interpretation of Dreams in the light of broader post-Enlightenment
attempts to theorise individuality.

MATT FFYTCHE is a lecturer at the Centre for Psychoanalytic

Studies, University of Essex. His research focuses on the history of
psychoanalysis, and critical theories of subjectivity in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. He is a co-editor of the web-based digital
archive, 'Deviance, Disorder and the Self'.
The Foundation of
the Unconscious
Schelling, Freud and the Birth
of the Modern Psyche

Matt ffytche

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,

New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521766494

© Matt ffytche 2012

For Andrea
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception Light cast over our camp as if in day by reason
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written and seeks cover underground.
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2012

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Ffytche, Matt.
The foundation of the unconscious : Schelling, Freud, and the birth of the
modern psyche / Matt Ffytche.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-76649-4 (hardback)
1. Subconsciousness. 2. Psychoanalysis — History. 3. Schelling,
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775-1854. 4. Freud, Sigmund,
1856-1939. I. Title.
BF315.F53 2011
154.209—dc23
2011031544

ISBN 978-0-521-76649-4 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Acknowledgements page viii

Introduction: the historiography of the unconscious 1

Part I The subject before the unconscious 35

1 A general science of the I: Fichte and the crisis of
self-identification 37
2 Natural autonomy: Schelling and the divisions of freedom 75

Part II The Romantic unconscious 97

3 Divining the individual: towards a metaphysics
of the unconscious 99
4 The historical unconscious: the psyche in the
Romantic human sciences 138
5 Post-idealism and the Romantic psyche 178

Part III The psychoanalytic unconscious 215

6 Freud: the Geist in the machine 217
7 The liberal unconscious 255
Conclusion 274

Bibliography 289
Index 306

vii
 Acknowledgements ix

critical dialogue and conversation on psychoanalysis, psychology,

German philosophy, contemporary theory and many points beyond
Acknowledgements and between. I also particularly want to remember my fellow partic-
ipants in the research student reading group on The Interpretation of
Dreams run by Jacqueline Rose at Queen Mary in 1999-2001, a forum
which played a big role in provoking my interest in that work, and in
the Graduate Forum in 'Psychoanalytic Thought, History and Political
Life' at London University, run by Daniel Pick and Jacqueline Rose,
which continues to be useful and to inform my researches on the intel-
lectual history of psychoanalysis.
I would like to thank John Forrester and the editorial team on Especial thanks go to my colleagues at the Centre for Psychoanalytic
Psychoanalysis and History for publishing an earlier draft of some Studies, at the University of Essex, who have supported the final stages of
of the arguments in Chapter 6 as "The Most Obscure Problem of this project, including in particular Roderick Main, Bob Hinshelwood,
All": Autonomy and its Vicissitudes in The Interpretation of Dreams', Andrew Samuels, Karl Figlio, Aaron Balick and Kevin Lu, and to Sanja
Psychoanalysis and History, 9,1 (2007), 39-70, and Joel Faflak for pub- Bahun and Leon Burnett in the department of Literature, Film and
lishing a portion of my earlier researches on the Romantic psyche as Theatre Studies, and Mike Roper in Sociology.
`F.W. J. Schelling and G. H. Schubert: Psychology in Search of Psyches', I owe a great debt to my parents, Tim and Barbi, for their support
in the issue on Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis he guest edited for and encouragement, for valuing the spaces of reading and thinking,
Romantic Circles Praxis Series (December 2008), and for his encourag- and building the bridge with Germany.
ing editorial comments. Above all I wish to honour the love, work and friendship of Andrea
I am very grateful to have had access to the collections at Senate Brady, careful and critical reader of this book, spur to my living and my
House Library, the Wellcome Library and the British Library, through- thinking, and who has helped me to keep my thought in life.
out the period of my research, and for the patience and professionalism This book will forever be associated with the birth of my daughters,
of the staff there. Also to the librarians and staff of the Albert Sloman Hannah and Ayla, who can only have experienced it as a mysterious
Library, University of Essex, and the libraries at Queen Mary, and at void in my presence, and I thank them for the immeasurable joy they
the Institute of Germanic Studies (University of London). I am grateful have given me, for which this work is a poor return.
to the Arts and Humanities Research Board who funded the begin-
nings of this project many years ago as a Ph.D. at Queen Mary, and to
Paul Hamilton for his benign supervision and preparedness to enter the
Schellingian abyss when it was still very dimly lit.
I count myself lucky, and am immensely grateful for the many
expert and critical readers of parts of this manuscript in earlier forms,
especially to John Forrester, Howard Caygill, Sonu Shamdasani and
Andrea Brady who read and commented on the first draft of this book,
and whose critical insights and practical support have been invaluable.
Also to Daniel Pick, Jacqueline Rose, Peter Dews, Peter Howarth, Will
Montgomery and Ben Watson who generously read and responded to
sections of this work and offered valuable suggestions and help. I would
like to thank Rowan Boyson, Molly MacDonald, Garry Kelly, Helen
McDowell, Dominic ffytche, Michele Barrett, David Dwan, Nikolay
Mintchev, Angus Nicholls, Keston Sutherland, Ian Patterson, John
Wilkinson and Jeremy Prynne, variously, for encouragement, support,

viii
 Introduction: the historiography of the
unconscious

We want to make the I into the object of this investigation, our most
personal I. But can one do that?'

The historiography of psychoanalysis needs radical revision. This book

poses the question: where does psychoanalysis begin? Which is to ask
both when can we begin with it historically, and how exactly does it
emerge? The conventional answer to those questions has, for many dec-
ades, been the one provided by Freud himself: that it begins in Vienna,
out of a combination of Freud's private clinical work with neurotics,
his collaboration with Josef Breuer in the treatment of hysteria, and
the period of depression which inaugurates his own self-analysis in the
1890s, all of which fed into the genesis of the Interpretation of Dreams
—theworkicfmanystheopigf'Fru2dancety.
MorecntshlaipgreyxtndoukwlegfFrd's
formative contexts, including the publication of his correspondence
with Wilhelm Fliess, and studies of the intellectual ambience of the
Viennese medical school and Freud's earliest work on neuro-anatomy,
as well as the crucial impact of his period of study with Charcot in
Paris. 3 Psychoanalysis, evidently, has broader roots than Freud's own

' Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. I: Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in die Psychoanalyse
and Neue Folge, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey
(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1982), 497. The translation is that given
by Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester
University Press, 1990), 59.
= See, for instance, Lionel Trilling's Introduction to Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus
(eds.) and abridged, Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (London:
Penguin, 1964), 12: 'But the basic history of psychoanalysis is the account of how it
grew in Freud's own mind, for Freud developed its concepts all by himself.'
' See, amongst others, S. Bernfeld, Treud's Earliest Theories and the School of
Helmholtz', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 13, (1994), 341-62; Ola Andersson, Studies in the
Prehistory 4 Psychoanalysis: The Etiology of Psychoneuroses and Some Related Themes in
Sigmund Freud's Scientific Writings and Letters, 1886-1896 (Stockholm: Svenska, 1962);
Peter Amacher, `Freud's Neurological Education and Its Influence on Psychoanalytic
'Theory', Psychological Issues 4, 4, Monograph 16 (New York: International University
Press, 1005); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (ed.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud
to FlieNA 1887 1904 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);

1
2 Introduction Introduction 3

self-investigation. Two reassessments, George Makari's Revolution in the nature philosopher and anthropologist G. H. Schubert,' one finds
Mind and Eli Zaretsky's Secrets of the Soul, both draw on such revisions many of the characteristic idioms associated with psychoanalytic theory
in psychoanalytic scholarship and shift the focus of study away from in the twentieth century: the notion of an internal mental division and a
Freud's own biography and towards colleagues, collaborators and the dialogue between a conscious and an unconscious self; the sense of con-
broader cultural climate. Even so, there remains a seemingly unshaken cealed or repressed aspects of one's moral nature; a new concern with
consensus that psychoanalysis is born out of the melting pot of late memory and the past, and with both developmental accounts of the self
nineteenth-century Viennese modernity. According to Zaretsky, 'we and reconstructions of the origins of consciousness. The first two items
have still not historicized psychoanalysis', but he takes this to mean listed here — the unconscious and repression — are those suggested by
exploring the breadth of its appeal and its contradictory impact on Freud as the principle cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory, accord-
twentieth-century culture. Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna is, for ing to his 1923 Encyclopaedia article on 'Psychoanalysis', the other two
Zaretsky, still the greatest attempt to 'grasp psychoanalysis historically'. 4 being the theory of sexuality and the Oedipus complex. 8
Equaly,forMkiwhtsnedalrbonigftheam Moreover, though Zaretsky sees in Freud 'the first great theory and
of inquiry in order to identify the many different fields from which Freud practice of "personal" life' 9 and Makari finds him trying to win for
`pulled together new ideas and evidence... to fashion a new discipline'. 5 science 'the inner life of human beings','° both accounts strangely
Nonefthswrk,iexcptonfSuhamdsi'gron- eclipse that moment, a hundred years earlier, which saw the produc-
breaking reassessment of the work of C. G. Jung, 6 pay any attention to tion of Rousseau's Confessions, Fichte's theory of subjectivity, Goethe's
the longer-range history of the 'unconscious psyche', or tie Freud's work Wilhelm Meister and Wordsworth's Prelude. This same period gave rise
back into the earlier nineteenth century's fascination with the obscure to both the various kinds of self-investigation practised by German
tiers, functions and forces at work below the level of consciousness, the Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, J. W. Ritter and Novalis, and
secret histories of the self. It is as if these notions emerge wholly unan- also J. C. Reil's coinage of psychotherapie, Carl Moritz's Magazine for
nounced in the 1890s. Empirical Psychology and many other similar initiatives, all organised
The object of this study is to provide a new and more complex account around the secular investigation of personal and interior life." Finally,
of the emergence of the idea of a psychic unconscious, and so to explore there emerges at this time a specific theoretical focus on the founda-
the possibility of giving psychoanalysis a much deeper historical con- tion of consciousness in earlier, more primitive and unconscious stages
text. There are good grounds for locating this moment historically at (both from the point of view of individual development, and as an issue
the threshold of the nineteenth century in Germany, under the wings for cultural history as a whole), as well as a new kind of psychological
of Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism. Here, at the very least, interest in peculiar or pathological states of mind, including forms of
one finds the initial integration of a theory of the unconscious with the madness, but also sleep, dreams and trances.
mind's inner medium, named as the 'psyche' or the 'soul' (Seele, the Various writers have at times suggested more distant points of incep-
word still used by Freud to indicate the psychical apparatus). Both of tion for the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, including Lancelot Law
these terms, already at this time, were set in the context of a psycho- Whyte in his slim 1960 volume The Unconscious Before Freud, and more
logical theory and a therapeutic practice which developed out of and importantly Henri Ellenberger, whose still unparalleled scholarship in
alongside a concern with mesmerism and animal magnetism. Here, The Discovery of the Unconscious traces the therapeutic contexts of depth
too, in the work of figures such as the idealist F. W. J. Schelling and
Throughout this book, 'anthropologist' will be used in the early nineteenth-century
sense of a general science of man.
Mark Solms, 'Freud, Luria and the Clinical Method', Psychoanalysis and History, 2, 8 Sigmund Freud, 'Two Encyclopaedia Articles', in The Standard Edition of the Complete
1 (February 2000), 76-109; Mark Luprecht, 'What People Call Pessimism': Sigmund Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey in collaboration
Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and Nineteenth-Century Controversy at the University of Vienna with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press
Medical School (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991). and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74) (hereafter SE), vol. XVIII, 247. See also
4 Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: a Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New
Stephen Frosh, Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis (London: The British Library, 2002),
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 3-4. I I, for an account of the unconscious as the single key concept in psychoanalysis.
s George Makari, Revolution in Mind: the Creation of Psychoanalysis (London: Gerald Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, 5.
Duckworth, 2008), 3. 1 " Makari, Revolution in Mind, 3.
" Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (Cambridge University " For more details sec Matthew Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology in Literature
Press, 2003). and Thologlt, 1700 18.10 (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4 Introduction Introduction 5

psychology back through various nineteenth-century trends to the Faflak's Romantic Psychoanalysis has advanced similar theoretical argu-
vogue for mesmerism in the eighteenth century. 12 Ellenberger's work ments, this time drawing on the work of British Romantic writers such
and that of Odo Marquard in the 1980s, both of which I will consider as Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey."
further below, provide important accounts of the way in which psycho- There are, however, a number of reasons why such works are not
analysis links back to Romantic intellectual contexts." Yet still surpris- particularly helpful to this investigation. One is that the idea of psycho-
ingly little work has been done on the interconnection of the various analysis which they seek to identify in the works of Romantic authors is
Romantic and idealist notions of the psyche and the unconscious, their not so much Freud's, but Freud read through the lens of Lacanian and
links to an emerging field of psychology, or their relation to a 'Freudian postmodern continental theory. (For Bowie, psychoanalysis is one out
unconscious' at the other end of the century." Whatever contemporary of many areas of modern theory in relation to which he is keen to estab-
interest there is in influences running between psychoanalysis and the lish Schelling as a foundational thinker — others include deconstruction,
epoch of Romanticism has come not from the history of ideas, or the Marxism and the postmodernism of Richard Rorty.) This is not just a
history of psychology, but from contemporary debates in literary theory dispute over the roots of psychoanalysis — `Lacan versus Freud'. The
and continental philosophy. Two obvious examples are The Indivisible problem is rather that psychoanalysis is assimilated too directly to the
Remainder by Slavoj Zilek and Schelling and Modern European Philosophy terms of the European philosophy of the subject. It is frequently a ques-
by Andrew Bowie, both of which have wanted to make a case for the tion of mapping post-Lacanian theory on to an older idealist and post-
close links between the work of Schelling and the conceptual apparatus idealist philosophy (by which it had already been informed via figures
of psychoanalysis." For ZiZek, for instance, Schelling's Ages of the World such as Alexandre Koyre and Alexandre Kojeve) rather than investigat-
[Weltalter] is 'a metapsychological work in the strict Freudian sense'. 16 ing the way in which proto-psychoanalytic concepts themselves emerge
Suchpbliatonsdeyrughtisaobcekwtr in the early nineteenth century, and what their original implications
in intellectual history on to the contemporary agenda and were the first were. Faflak's Romantic Psychoanalysis is an intricate and thoughtful
indications of a more recent Schelling revival. 17 More recently, Joel study, thoroughly immersed in the task of unearthing the relevance of
Romantic forms of psychological and aesthetic reflection for contem-
12 Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York: Anchor Books, 1962);
porary debates on the 'fragility' or structural elusiveness of subjectivity.
Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of However, he uses the term 'psychoanalysis' in the wider sense given it
Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Fontana Press, 1994). by the philosophers and literary critics of deconstruction, for whom it
13 For parallels in historical work on psychiatry, see the suggestion in F. G. Alexander

and S. T. Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry: an Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought

means submitting the grounds of subjectivity to a process of infinite
and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), inquiry. Such analyses are in turn directed towards establishing the
135, that: 'In their new and enthusiastic concern over the nature of the psyche, the historical groundlessness of subjectivity, or an 'interiority inconsistent
Romantics brought psychiatry to the threshold of modern concepts and techniques'.
14 Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (eds.), Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-
with itself.' 9 What is at stake in such texts, then, is really an argument
Century German Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is a recent work which about the postmodern 'de-centred subject', and a (plausible) attempt to
brings together essays by Sonu Shamdasani, Paul Bishop, Matthew Bell and others, locate certain anticipations of this debate within Romanticism. Likewise
as an attempt to start to piece together perspectives on the nineteenth-century field.
15 Slavoj Zikek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters 2i2ek and Bowie equate the terms and structures of Romantic philoso-
(London: Verso, 1996); Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy phy directly with those of contemporary theory. But in making the con-
(London: Routledge, 1993). nection between psychoanalysis and German idealism, such works are
16 ZiZek, The Indivisible Remainder, 9.

' 7 '2' iZek wrote a major interpretive essay to accompany the first translation of Schelling's not primarily pursuing the genealogy of psychoanalytic concepts at all.
1813 draft of Ages of the World (Slavoj Zilek/F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of What is missing is a concern with how and why the terminology of the
Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman, Ann Arbor: The University of unconscious psyche emerges in this Romantic context in the first place.
Michigan Press, 1997) (hereafter, Schelling, Ages) and since then there have been
a spate of publications fostering dialogue between the work of Schelling and that of
Freud, Lacan and also Heidegger, Deleuze and Levinas, and between Romantic phil-
osophy and postmodern theories of the subject. See, for instance, Judith Norman and
Alistair Welchman (eds.), The New Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 16Sec Joel Fa fla k, Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (Albany, NY: State
2004), and Jason M. Wirth (ed.), Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings (Bloomington, University of New York Press, 2008).
IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). '" Ibid., 1 3.
6 Introduction The broader unconscious 7

Where does it emerge from, and how and why does it begin to function be suggesting that the historical emergence of new concepts must itself
so centrally within psychological theory? 2° sometimes be modelled on the obscure and unknowable irruptions of the
A second problem is that such works tend to deal with psycho- unconscious itself, but such an assumption forecloses any attempt to give
theoretical questions in a way that abstracts them from frameworks of the unconscious itself a history.
historical enquiry, beyond the bare essentials of descriptive contextual-
isation. This means that they fail to incorporate a dynamic and crit-
The broader unconscious
ical sense of the shifting cultural connotations of such crucial terms as
`psyche', 'personal identity', 'spirit' and 'individual existence', over the In wanting thus to recognise how concepts of the psyche and the
course of one or two centuries, likewise the striking shift in assumptions unconscious function in more general currents of intellectual and cul-
about the nature of 'self-consciousness', 'independence', 'individuality' tural history in the early nineteenth century, I am not aiming simply to
itself, and so on. They fail, that is, to give an adequate representation temper contemporary perspectives with a more sensitive reconstruc-
of the ideological pressures which, over time, have pulled the 'uncon- tion of the past. Rather my concern is that the angle of vision has been
scious' and the 'psyche', one way or another, into different signify- much too narrow. The study of the unconscious — which Buchholz and
ing contexts which fundamentally change their meaning. Positioning Godde have termed the `Zentralmassiv of psychoanalysis' 23 — requires to
Schelling's work in relation to Kant, ZiZek is nonetheless keen to read be opened up, vastly, before we can begin to make sense of such issues
Schelling's work radically out of context as exhibiting a 'double non- as the emergence of a strictly 'psychoanalytic' unconscious and the
contemporaneity to his own time'. 21 But though formal accounts of the rationale for its appearance in modernity. We need to look beyond the
structure of psychic and subjective life may beg to be read philosoph- Freudian and Jungian paradigms, let alone the Lacanian or Derridean,
ically and trans-historically, there are serious problems with such an to the outlines of a broader nineteenth-century interest in the uncon-
approach. Do terms such as 'subjectivity' and 'psyche' mean the same scious for which there is no single logic and no single history. The
things in the nineteenth, twentieth and now twenty-first centuries? unconscious we associate with psychoanalysis — and which remains one
What would `metapsychology' have meant for Schelling, and could he of the most fundamental concepts in contemporary psycho-dynamic
ever have intended it in the Freudian sense? theory, of whatever persuasion — is a fragment of a much larger puzzle.
By abstracting such concepts from wider debates in nineteenth- By the end of the century, it had in fact become so ubiquitous a concept
century psychology, anthropology, political theory, religion and from that the question is not so much 'did Freud inherit the unconscious
metaphysics, or from cultural and aesthetic theory, one loses crucial from earlier in the century', but which versions of it did he inherit?
interpretive factors. What is really being argued through the notion of an Already in the late eighteenth century there emerged notions of a
unconscious? What issues are thinkers attempting to resolve as they reor- life force which governs the organic and developmental functions of
ganise their theory of mind? It may be that cultural and socio-political the body — described by Herder as 'the inner genius of my being'24 —
factors are crucial in accounting for the way the notion of a psychic and which is either entirely distinguished from the soul, or imagined
unconscious moves centre-stage at this point in time, casting its shadow to represent unconscious capacities within it. As the nineteenth cen-
back over the Age of Reason. When ZiZek describes Schelling's ideas tury advances, such ideas are partly translated into the discourse of an
as emerging in a brief flash, which 'renders visible something that was `unconscious', an example being the writings of Carl Gustav Carus,
invisible beforehand and withdrew into invisibility thereafter', 22 he may whom C. G. Jung cited as a forerunner to his own work. Besides such
vitalist ideas there is the Romantic medical and philosophical interest
in the phenomena of mesmerism and somnambulism, documented by
Faflak is most concerned not with psychology at all, but with the 'poetics of psy-
choanalysis', meaning these broader questions of identity linked to post-struc-
turalist philosophies of the subject. He argues that these trends are implicitly ' Michael B. Buchholz and Gunter Godde (eds.), Macht und Dynamik des Unbewussten:
there in Freud, though repressed beneath 'his confirmed scientism', Romantic Auseittandersetzungen in Philosophic, Medizin und Psychoanalyse, in the series Das
Psychoanalysis, 14. Inhewasste, 3 vols. (Gie[lcn: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005), 11.
21 2iZek, The Indivisible Remainder, 8. -' Johann ( ;tit fried Herder, cited in Stefan Goldmann, 'Von der "Lebenskraft" zum
22 Ibid., 8. "llithewtissien —, in Buchholz and Giidde, Macht und Dynamik, 127.
 8 Introduction The broader unconscious 9

Ellenberger and others, and connected with this are various attempts to Pierre Janet, F. W. H. Myers and others, including the subconscious,
theorise the different unconscious forces, functions and powers govern- the subliminal, and the dissociated aspects of the self. 27
ing trance and hypnoid states reported in the burgeoning literature on Attempts to trace the impact of these instances of the unconscious
psychopathology. On a different front there are philosophical debates through to Freud and to Jung have been necessarily piecemeal. Jung
running throughout the century, from the immediate post-Kantians to openly acknowledged his debt to many of these precursors, particu-
figures such as J. S. Mill and later Franz Brentano, which are concerned larly the work of Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Carus. But
to establish the limits of reason, or to argue for or against the possibil- there are also obvious traces in Freud's writings of the legacy of mes-
ity of unconscious ideas. Yet another avatar of the unconscious, which merism and psychophysics, Romantic literature and the philosophy of
increases its hold as one moves through the century, is the evocation of nature. As Buchholz and Grodde argue, 'Freud was in no way prepared
the buried past of the mind, to which we could add a broader sense of to content himself with a clinical psychology. The claims of his meta-
the unconscious as the primeval, the inherited, or the deep historical psychology aim far beyond that and lay claim to a terrain that had been
past. Also of great importance to any survey of the nineteenth-century traditionally leased to theology and philosophy'. 28
unconscious is Schopenhauer's more metaphysical portrait of nature A complete understanding of the rationale for the development of the
as a vast organism with its own unconscious will, which was further unconscious in the nineteenth century would require nothing less than
developed in the light of evolutionary theory by Eduard von Hartmann a cultural history of the nineteenth century itself, and a sensitivity not
in his Philosophy of the Unconscious which ran to eleven German editions only to 'influences' of various generations of thinkers on each other, but
between 1868 and 1904 and was first translated into English in 1884. 25 also to confluences between radically different yet cognate terms, and
AnothercuialbyfonceptisJhaFrdHebt's various permutations and infiltrations across disciplinary fields. This
descriptions of the way ideas in the mind are thrust above or below the would hardly amount to a 'tradition' — certainly, nothing so clear as a
threshold of mental perception according to particular degrees of men- tradition linking Freud to the Romantics. Such a study could at most
tal force — notions which fed through into Gustav Fechner's psycho- sketch the evolution of a set of ideas and problems, linked to a term
physical investigations of the 1850s. Both of these writers influenced distributed across quite far-flung contexts. The unconscious pervades
some of Freud's earliest ideas on repression in terms of the vicissitudes psychiatry, medicine and psychology, but also philosophy, religion and
of quantities of psychical energy. Somewhere we must also take into metaphysics and theories of nature and history, as well as more popu-
account Romantic theories of genius and creativity as emanations of lar psychological and cultural elaborations in novels, poems and moral
unconscious life, as well as such poetical and spiritual descriptions of essays, in such a way that one can hardly begin to describe its 'specific'
the unconscious as 'the darkness in which the roots of our being disap- provenance. Did Freud imbibe the term in a medical context, or from
pears, the insoluble secret in which rests the magic of life'. 26 student discussions of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, from his interests in
Many of these languages of the unconscious tend towards the overtly myth and Victorian anthropology, or even from youthful readings in
religious or metaphysical — at times the unconscious signals nothing Jean-Paul Richter, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Borne. 29
less than the immanent and mysterious power of a divine creator, or For these reasons, this book is not so directly concerned with track-
of 'nature' or the 'absolute' which come to stand in for this in only ing a specific 'line of influence' from Schelling to Freud. But why, then,
partly secularised ways. But equally, and from early on in the century, turn to intellectual shifts in Germany in the early 1800s? What spe-
the unconscious is used in a more limited and empirical way to indi- cifically can be found there to inform us of what is going on later in
cate automatic functions such as reflexes. Further into the Victorian the century? My conviction is that there is something instructive about
period, neurological and physiological usages emerge, such as 'uncon-
scious cerebration', and finally from the 1880s onwards there are the
ji For details of Janet's work on the subconscious and dissociation, see Ellenberger,
new psychiatric and psychological coinages emerging in the work of Discovery, 331-417; for subliminal consciousness, see F. W. H. Myers, 'The Subliminal
Consciousness', Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 7 (February 1892),
280 355.
25 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Buchholz und Giidde, Macht und Dynamik, 18.
Coupland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931). )" Sec Freud's brief 'A Note on the Prehistory of the Technique of Analysis', SE, vol.
26 Friedrich Schlegel, cited in Buchholz and &icicle, Macht und Dynamik, 105. XVIII, 205.
 10 Introduction Methodological problems 11

examining the inception of a concern with the unconscious. It is true in what he calls the second industrial revolution, 'roughly 1880s to
that one can trace instances of this concern back indefinitely, and cer- 1920s'. 31 Although many individuals may only have gained practical
tainly late eighteenth-century thinkers interested in an unconscious experience of certain freedoms towards the end of the nineteenth cen-
were aware of certain specific precursors — most obviously Leibniz's tury, the idea of those freedoms had been elaborated long before this in
notion of petites perceptions, the mass of smaller details which go to make writings of the Romantic period.
up the quality of more general sense perceptions, but of which, taken I should emphasise here that, though I am making Schelling central
individually, we may be unconscious. However, something happens in to this investigation of the emergence of the idea of the unconscious,
the early nineteenth century which introduces some dramatic changes and of the moulding of this unconscious into forms which will be incor-
to the way in which such a discourse of the unconscious functions. Its porated into an emergent Romantic psychology, Schelling would not
usage and usefulness is greatly expanded — many of the different ver- have perceived himself as a 'psychologist', or have wanted to carve out
sions of the unconscious listed above are already in operation in this a philosophical role for psychology in the modern sense. 32 He was, how-
early phase, as subsequent chapters will show. The term is also already ever, concerned to centralise the role of the 'psyche' — as opposed to
tied to a new interest in the psyche and starts to take on a quite novel `consciousness' or 'reason' — within a new ontology of the self, to the
central role within psychological, philosophical and metaphysical argu- extent that some of his works develop a philosophy of the unconscious
ment about the nature and development of subjective identity. From psyche. For this reason, and particularly in this period, it is important
having been a side issue, the unconscious becomes a fulcrum for cer- not to determine the boundaries of 'psychology' too exclusively, or to
tain tendencies within the natural and human sciences, and Friedrich limit its meaning either to later notions of an experimental science, or
Schelling is central to this development. to earlier ones which specifically announce themselves as `psycholo-
Certain things are also apparent in the early 1800s that will be gies'. 33 As we shall see, philosophical and psychological constructs were
harder to make out one hundred years on, partly because by then, even constantly impinging on each other, influencing each other's attempts
though it remains a highly contested idea in some fields, aspects of the to materialise the constitution of inner life. This is particularly the case
unconscious (conceptually, ideologically and metaphorically) will have where increased attention to the unconscious is concerned.
become part of the general background of late Victorian cultural and
scientific understanding. By going back to the beginning of the century Methodological problems
it is possible not only to trace more clearly the logic by which philosoph-
ical and psychological notions of the unconscious emerge and begin to If one accepts that an investigation into the development of Romantic
interact, but also to learn from informative debates on the necessity of and idealist concepts of the unconscious psyche will provide an
the unconscious as a core principle for the human sciences, and even extremely valuable framework for understanding the later emergence
more particularly in psychology. In examining such arguments, we can of psychoanalysis and its success within the human sciences, as well
see that the unconscious is not just implicated in psychology insofar as locating these in relation to wider movements in European thought
as psychology becomes interested in acknowledging and investigating and culture, the task still poses some very particular difficulties for the
phenomena on or beyond the fringe of consciousness — such as dream- historian of ideas.
ing and madness. Right from the start, an unconscious within the indi- First of all, as noted, the term 'unconscious' has a propensity to slip
vidual is central to psychology for additional reasons, one of which is away as a coherent object for historical analysis, because of its diffusion
the role it plays in enabling philosophers and psychologists to conceive
" Ibid., 5.
of autonomy, spontaneity, creativity or self-development within indi- See, for instance, Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology, 163.
viduals. Here Zaretsky's insight that Freud 'gave expression to possi- " On the pitfalls of limiting the definition of the psychological in historical work, see
bilities of individuality, autonomy, authenticity and freedom that had Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: the Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6-25: 'An historian of psychology
only recently emerged' is perhaps crucia1. 3° Where Zaretsky is at fault, who approaches the past looking for thinkers and thoughts that closely resemble
though, is in his timing which places the emergence of these concerns present-day academic psychologists and their theories (in other words, looking for
narrowly defined "precursors") will tend to overlook the rich variety of psychological
discourses t hat have been produced in past eras, and which have (positively and nega-
so Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, 7. tively) shaped subsequent ideas', 24.
 12 Introduction Methodological problems 13

across a wide number of discursive contexts. The notion of an 'uncon- Schelling exerted a very broad influence over the continental develop-
scious' was articulated, extended and correlated, this way and that, ment of natural and biological science and psychology in the first half of
between philosophy, psychology, natural history, spiritualism and lit- the nineteenth century, as well as on the post-Romantic concept of the
erature throughout the nineteenth century before it became more imagination and, as I will argue, the psychic unconscious. For Stefan
restrictively associated with the new science of psychoanalysis. Thus Goldman it is Schelling in 1800 who uses the term 'unconscious' as a
any attempt to stabilise its history within a particular institutional or substantive for the first time, in the context of his analysis of the uncon-
cultural domain is bound to tell only a small portion of the story. scious conditions of self-consciousness and the sources of art. 37
Secondly, there is the particular difficulty in historicising concepts Fourthly, there are difficulties in establishing a neutral set of refer-
of mind per se. It is one thing to deal with the broader repercussions of ence points for such an enquiry, given the complex ideological conflicts
action in politics and society, where questions of internal motives can waged over languages of mind even now, in which the various schools
be relegated to the position of secondary and speculative features of a of psychoanalysis are themselves vociferous protagonists. As Irma
historical account. But it is another to deal with the 'ego', the 'soul' or Gleiss argues, 'the psychoanalytic movement has taken great pains to
the 'I' as themselves historical constructs. Can these, to mirror Freud's marginalise its Romantic companions — for instance, C. G. Jung and
question in the New Introductory Lectures, be made into the object of Georg Groddeck'. 38 Psychoanalysis already has various internal narra-
an investigation? 34 Can they be extracted as historical objects, even if tives concerning the historical inception of psychoanalytic structures —
one is assured of their shifting historical definitions? How does one including those outlined by Freud in Totem and Taboo, Civilization
historicise or even locate the interchanges between modes of lived self- and Its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle — which generally
perception and, for instance, the broader transformations of religious identify this inception with distant moments in cultural, if not species,
and scientific languages? prehistory. Leaving these aside, there is the fiercely guarded tendency,
Thirdly, there are still major obstacles to the interpretation of German already noted, to associate the prehistory of psychoanalytic concepts
idealism within the framework of materialism and empiricism which with the prehistory of Freud's own career leading up to the publication
has so dominated Anglo-American intellectual history. Many aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams. At one extreme, there are those studies
of the German conceptual terrain appear radically alien from the other which equate the emergence of psychoanalysis entirely with the pro-
side of this interpretive rift, and it is quite common for historians of cess of Freud's own self-analysis and investigation of his dream life (for
mind, or of psychology, who are happy to attend to aspects of Kant and instance by Anzieu and Grinstein). 39 In looking beyond Freud for the
Schopenhauer's thought, to steer carefully around philosophers such beginnings of nineteenth-century interest in a psychical unconscious,
as Schelling and Fichte because of the difficulties of reconstructing one is moving somewhat critically against the tide. Historical investiga-
their assumptions. Work by Frederick Beiser, Terry Pinkard and Karl tions which seek to establish alternative contexts for the emergence of
Ameriks has begun to rectify this situation to some extent as regards psychoanalytic structures cannot help but present themselves, in some
philosophy, but little impact has been made as yet on the historio- way, as acts of delegitimation. Frank J. Sulloway's Freud: Biologist of
graphy of psychology. Graham Richards in his survey of psychological
ideas from 1600 to 1850 squeezes an allusion to German idealism from
Fichte to Hegel into a half-paragraph, though he is able to devote much Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford University Press, 1993) also leaps from Kant
more space to the empiricist responses to Kant of Fries, Herbart and to Schopenhauer, and emphasises a lineage from Descartes to Husserl, bypassing
Beneke. 35 Edward S. Reed investigates the Romantic assumptions of German Romanticism.
17
Goldmann, Won der "Lebenskraft" zum "Unbewussten"', in Buchholz and Godde,
the Shelleys, but makes only a few scant references to the idealists and Macht und Dynamik, 138. See also Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie:
the German Romantic Naturphdosophen. 39 This, despite the fact that A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Jean
Steinberg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 234-5 for an account of Schelling's dom-
inating influence over mid-century academic psychiatry.
34 Freud, SE, vol. XX, 58. 111
Irma Gleiss, 'Der romantische Weg in die Tiefe', in Buchholz and Godde, Macht und
35 Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: the Origins and Consequences of Psychological Dynamik, 95.
Ideas, 1600-1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 298. 1 .1
I )idier Anzieu, Freud's Self-Analysis, trans. Peter Graham (Madison, CT: International
36 Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: the Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin Universities I'ress, 1986); Alexander Grinstein, Sigmund Freud's Dreams (New York:
to William lames (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Michel Henry's The I Inertial iona I Universities Press, 1980).
 14 Introduction Marquard 15

the Mind, for instance, bears the subtitle 'Beyond the Psychoanalytic and their historical inception in the context of post-Kantian idealism
Legend'. 4° and Romanticism. But it is also my belief that broadening the frame-
One major exception to the occlusion of Romantic and idealist con- work for thinking about the emergence of the psychic unconscious does
tributions to psychoanalytic concepts, within psychoanalytic historiog- more than enable one merely to uncover further historical reaches of
raphy, must be made for Henri Ellenberger's landmark volume on the Freud or Jung's cultural inheritance. These contexts reveal unrecog-
Discovery of the Unconscious, which is still unsurpassed in its historical nised historical implications of the psychoanalytic project itself. That
range and the multiplicity of perspectives it sheds on the emergence of is, by disturbing the roots of psychoanalytic historiography we can
what he identifies as 'dynamic psychiatry' or 'dynamic psychotherapy'. allow new perspectives and wholly new questions to emerge. In this
That book traces the origins of such dynamic theories of mental life light I want to consider two major theoretical studies which have situ-
`through a long line of ancestors and forerunners', going all the way ated the unconscious in just such a way — not in relation to medical
back to the eighteenth century, where Ellenberger pursues the fortunes positivism in fin de siecle Vienna, but to a nexus of issues emerging at the
of the mesmerist movement into Germany and thus into transformative beginning of the century. One of these works establishes a genealogical
contact with Romantic philosophy. He provides brief accounts of the relation between Freudian psychoanalysis and German idealism, the
psychological theories of Schelling, G. H. Schubert and C. G. Carus, as other relates the unconscious — as theoretical object of psychoanalysis —
well as comparisons with the framework of Freudian metapsychology. 41 to a paradigmatic upheaval at the end of the eighteenth century that
However, Ellenberger is examining a particular aspect of the psycho- gave birth to the modern human sciences. In both cases this greater
analytic phenomenon — 'the mystery of the mechanism of psychological temporal reach makes the unconscious diagnostically central within
healing' from exorcism to hypnotism to talking cure. He investigates a broader account of modern culture and its distinctive ideological
why 'certain patients respond to a certain type of cure while others do transformations.
not', a phenomenon 'of great theoretical importance to the study of
psychiatry as the basis of a new science of comparative psychotherapy'. 42
Marquard
In this case, approaching the 'problem' of the psyche means being able
to set the therapeutic claims of psychoanalysis in a wider framework of The first text is Odo Marquard's highly original and provocative
historically identifiable practices, including mesmerism, hypnotism and study, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie,
Romantic psychiatry. But in focusing on the history of therapy, he gave Psychoanalyse, which, though now twenty years old, has yet had little
less attention to the history of conceptual developments around the ego, impact on historical research on psychology in the Anglo-American
the psyche and the unconscious — concerns which only partly overlap world. 43 The book is concerned with the philosophical genealogy link-
with his own. ing psychoanalysis to the project of German idealism — as Marquard
All these hindrances to study — the diffuse application of the con- puts it, 'The point was to show that certain elements of psychoanalysis
cept of an unconscious; the difficulty of historicising concepts of mind; were actually "philosophical" ones'. 44 He begins with a description of
paradigmatic confusion over the terms of German idealism; and the how Kant's transcendental philosophy was drawn towards the terrain
resistance of psychoanalysis to its historicisation — have in one way or of aesthetics in The Critique of Judgement in an attempt to reconcile the
another impaired historians' ability to assess the significance of the structure of rational thought, as Kant conceived it, with the idea of
intersection between theories of the unconscious and theories of the human freedom. In Marquard's reading, the path taken by philosophy
psyche in the early nineteenth century, or of the links running forwards at this juncture led in a particularly unpromising direction — towards
to new accounts of individuality and interiority in modernity. With this a decline or enchantment of the Enlightenment commitment to self-
in mind, the object of this study is simply to establish a more developed awareness and political self-determination. Marquard suggests, in
understanding of the relationship between the terms of psychoanalysis

40 Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New " Odo Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie,
York: Basic Books, 1979). Aychounalyse (Cologne: Jurgen Dinter, 1987). An exception to this neglect is
41 See particularly Ellenberger, Discovery, 202-8. Shanulasani's long and the Making of Modern Psychology.
42 Ibid., 3. " Ibid., 2.
16 Introduction Marquard 17

part, that the turn to aesthetics, in order to theorise a model for the shifting its engagement with cosmopolitan political history towards
spontaneous operation of judgement, disengaged thinking and acting a concern with transcendental aesthetics, and then on to theories
from the terrain of social and political conflict in which the nature of nature and natural teleology. The second stage in the argu-
of freedom — and the possibility of its historical production — is ulti- ment explores the consequent flourishing of a Romantic philosophy
mately to be defined. There was, as it were, a dangerous hiving-off of of nature — Marquard has Schelling and his disciples primarily in
the enquiry into subjective freedom from historical and social contexts mind — which develops a metaphysical account of the unconscious
within which such questions are immediately implicated, and, at the grounds of human life in nature as a counterweight to the instabili-
same time, the substitution of a more illusory and gratifying terrain for ties originally diagnosed in history and politics. Again, he reads this
study (that of aesthetic consumption). On the other hand (and it is this further 'falling away from the historico-political framework towards
development with which Marquard is particularly concerned) Kant's nature' as an affliction born of historical pessimism: 'Where the
allied attempt to speculate on the teleological structure of nature as transcendental philosophy fails to ground the historical hopes of
an organic whole threatened to bolster the transcendental account of humanity, historico-philosophically, on political reason, the attempt
human freedom in another way. The danger for the Enlightenment of natural philosophy forces them to be grounded on the unconscious
project was that it would illicitly substantiate an account of human grounds of "nature".' 48 Translated into natural-historical, rather than
potential — potential freedom and potential harmony — by giving it a political-historical terms, transcendental philosophy — its theory of
speculative basis in 'nature', at the very same time as these ideals were man, of subjectivity and of human freedom — is elaborated in the
failing to materialise in human history. For all its seeming concreteness early 1800s in terms of unconscious grounds and 'unknown history'.
and 'materiality', the turn to a philosophy of nature was in danger of That is to say, this subjectivity and this freedom are thought to exist
shoring up a grand metaphysical illusion. Marquard's target is not so as a potential, and this potential is elicited via speculative construc-
much Kant himself as the propensity, in post-Kantian philosophy, for tions of the natural history thought to precede it. Human freedom
transcendental projections of the structures underlying human experi- is something continually evolving out of its origins in nature. Their
ence to be formulated as an aesthetics, and for such aesthetic theories muse is 'a Mnemosyne who no longer recollects history but rather
to embed themselves in speculative theories of natural history: 'Where prehistory'. Ironically, for the generation writing in the first quar-
historical reason has become "transcendental", that is, indeterminate ter of the nineteenth century, the philosophy of development now
as to its goal and means ... the hope emerges that nature will replace `becomes predominantly a philosophy of the past'. 49
that which is failing.'45 The final step in Marquard's argument is that psychoanalysis is sim-
It is this tendency in the development of German thought to 'trans- ply a modification of the methods of thinking originally adopted by
port the political definition of history, into a definition of history split transcendental philosophy and then transformed into such a philoso-
off from the political' which particularly arouses Marquard's critical phy of nature: 'One could say that psychoanalysis is a disenchanted
concern.“ A similar analysis is made of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Romantic Naturphilosophie, that's why it thinks in the manner of this
Education: they 'break off without having resolved the dilemma posed Naturphilosophie:5° In support, he provides a list of various conceptual
between beauty and the political'. Marquard sees this as symptomatic features the two ideologies hold in common, for instance, the turn from
of a political resignation so decisive that the dilemma can only be for- mind to 'nature', the stress on recollection and clarifying the prehistory
gotten. In Schiller's later On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, the role of of the ego, as well as the project of consciously retrieving unconscious
the artist is solicited 'no longer in relation to history and the state, but histories. He suggests that the relationship between the two periods has
in its relation to "Natur"'.47 remained unnoticed largely for the reason that Schelling's writings are
Rut how does this relate to the history of psychology? These are no longer read.
the first steps in Marquard's complex narrative about ideology in Marquard's account of the emergence of such terms as 'repression'
early nineteenth-century Germany which shows German philosophy and 'unconscious nature', and his identification of their ideological

'' Ibid., 155. 1 " Ibid., 155. " Ibid., 150. I" Ibid., 156. 1 " Ibid., 15H. 5 " Ibid., 163.
 18 Introduction Foucault 19

function in this early nineteenth-century context, is penetrating and order.' 52 The field of knowledge — its reflection of the 'order of things'
persuasive and adds immensely to our perception of the relationship in the world — was co-extensive with certain practices of representation
between psychoanalysis and its prehistory within other disciplinary inherent in the production of taxonomies, tables and systems of clas-
fields. However, from the point of view of a history of psychology, his sification. According to Foucault, there was as yet no sense of a 'gap'
final negative judgement on that set of ideological transformations is between the power to arrange and connect such systems and notions of
distorted. His work becomes a polemic directed by philosophy against the structure of the world itself, nor of the constructive input of human-
the emergence of nineteenth-century anthropology and psychology. kind as the agent of such organised knowledge. But at the end of the
In his reading, psychoanalysis is a final symptom of transcendental eighteenth century, the argument runs, this efficiently functioning para-
philosophy's falling away (implicitly through lack of critical nerve) digm broke down. Questions were raised about the origin of represen-
from an engagement with political reason. For Marquard, psycho- tation as a specific form of thinking, and representation itself lost 'the
analytic psychology is shot through with appeals to historical experi- power to provide a foundation ... for the links that can join its various
ence — to the past, to recollection, to unconscious grounds — which elements together'." At the same time, 'man', the newly perceived agent
function culturally as a way of displacing conscious historical experi- of knowledge, became the object of a new kind of investigation — that
ence (social and political) into these speculatively constructed and of the 'human sciences'. These sought to replace 'representation' with
somewhat mythical unconscious dimensions of human life. But what a set of more foundational principles, derived from examination of the
from Marquard's standpoint of 'political reason' appears as a narrative productive activities of human life itself: 'on the horizon of any human
of Verfall, might be recast, from an alternative disciplinary perspec- science there is the project of bringing man's consciousness back to its
tive, as a narrative about the emergence of new sciences of human life real conditions.' 54
and experience. For surely, what he is charting, without ever acknow- To some extent Kant is again the major exemplum of this epis-
ledging it in such terms, is also the emergence of a more empirical and temological turn. His Critique of Pure Reason 'sanctions for the first
secular psychology, which draws on medicine and philosophy as well time ... the withdrawal of knowledge and thought outside the space
as aesthetics and new theories of organic nature in order to develop of representation'." But, as a result, a problematic duality is installed
an account of human being adequate to the post-Enlightenment age. within the human sciences at their very inception. On the one hand,
What happens when such a narrative is retold from the perspective of they have as their object the life, histories and cultures of empirical
a history of psychology, as a discipline which, rather than merely per- human beings; but on the other hand, because human life is now to pro-
verting the course of political philosophy, is seeking its own new foun- vide a basis for the theory of knowledge in general, human experience
dations by transforming the moral and spiritual languages of body, becomes the focus of a new kind of foundational project, to be pursued
soul and mind? beneath and beyond the merely empirical and descriptive investigations
of human culture and history. The connective power which had, in
the classical epoch, been attributed to representation itself, must now
Foucault
be sought 'outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in
The second work to situate psychoanalysis in relation to the idealist a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than
period is Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, which gives the 'uncon- representation itself'. 56 Seen in this way, the emergence of the 'problem
scious' a special role within Foucault's account of an `epistemic shift' of the unconscious', for Foucault, is not a contingent theoretical issue
in modernity. 5 ' The middle section of this work sketches a portrait of that happens to appear in the nineteenth century; rather it is 'ultimately
the classical period (i.e. the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) in coextensive' with the very existence of the human sciences and is the
which knowledge was perfectly homogenous: 'All knowledge, of what- shadow cast by the human sciences themselves. 57
ever kind, proceeded to the ordering of its material by the establishment l-'oucault's interest in the unconscious centres on the ways in which
of differences and defined those differences by the establishment of an society, emerging self-consciously as itself the agent of representation,

" Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Ibid., 346. '" Ibid., 238 9. 51 Ibid., 364.
'Favistock, 1980). " Ibid., 212. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 364.
20 Introduction Foucault 21

attempted to establish a hypothetical relationship to the deeper or foun- 1950s), then what do we make of the emergence of the 'psyche' and the
dational basis of its own practice, whether this was viewed in logical, `unconscious' at the beginning of the epoch under review? What of the
historical or evolutionary terms. But this means that the unconscious contribution of figures such as Schelling who, taking up and transform-
indicates a very diverse set of ideological phenomena. At some points ing Kant's transcendental concerns, was already altering the notion of
Foucault seems to use it as shorthand for the whole project of German epistemology to incorporate an explicit principle of unconsciousness?
idealism itself — 'A transcendental raising of level that is, on the other And what of Carus' mid-century assertion that 'The key to an under-
side, an unveiling of the non-conscious is constitutive of all the sciences standing of the nature of the conscious life of the soul lies in the sphere
of man'. 58 At other points, his concern is with those aspects of human of the unconscious'? 61
phenomena which escape the rationalising drive for self-consciousness What is missing from Foucault's account is first of all a more adequate
of a cogito. It represents the `unthought' aspects of human life and evocation of the German, as opposed to the French, intellectual con-
production. In yet other moments, Foucault alludes to the attempt to text stretching from the mid eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth
ground human existence through the intellectual recovery of distant century (thus developing across the period in which Foucault posits his
historical origins. Foucault assimilates all these different versions of epistemic break). That context is concerned precisely with such tran-
the unconscious to a single principle which forms a powerful undertow scendental objects as consciousness, knowledge, structure, grounded-
within his account of the nineteenth century as a whole. Psychoanalysis, ness and, eventually, the unconscious and history — the very objects
in this story, is the point at the threshold of the twentieth century where which Odo Marquard examines. One would want, at the least, a more
the necessary relation between the human sciences and an 'uncon- careful depiction of the relationship between the emergence of the
scious' breaks out into the open as a named theoretical object, just human sciences and these already complex speculations on the nature
as in Foucault's earlier scheme of the eighteenth century 'representa- of knowledge and justification. But in fact, beyond Kant, Foucault
tion' became a conscious issue for the nineteenth century. The twen- makes very little reference to the German context. Jurgen Habermas
tieth century becomes conscious of the unconscious — which is not the noted the absence of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre in The Order of Things,
same as saying that the unconscious is dissolved. Rather, it appears for and also suggested Schelling as evidence of a much earlier awareness
the first time: 'Whereas all the human sciences advance towards the of human being 'as the remote product of a history ... of which it is not
unconscious only with their back to it ... psychoanalysis points directly master'. 62
towards it, with a deliberate purpose ... towards what is there and yet is But there is a second kind of omission in Foucault's account, which
hidden.' 59 Psychoanalysis sets itself the task of 'making the discourse of one might describe as the moral and political pressures bearing down
the unconscious speak through consciousness'. upon the terms of the discursive shift which he isolates as an autono-
This account of the emergence of the unconscious raises some intri- mous epistemological occurrence. This is of course an intentional prod-
guing questions. For a start, it sheds some light on Foucault's own uct of the structuralist approach which is concerned to abstract and
implicit methodological assumptions — namely, that intellectual phe- isolate the structures of discourses as agents of their own history — the
nomena in the nineteenth century are being re-read through the lens `folding over of each separated [epistemological] domain upon its own
of French structuralist debates in the 1950s and 1960s. The uncon- development', is the way Foucault describes the transitional process."
scious which the human sciences struggle towards is revealed (in the But by concentrating on the emergence of epistemological structures
light of the work of Saussure and Levi-Strauss) as being the inferred as in some sense free-standing entities, he precludes any investigation
prior system of signification underlying discursive performance: 'the of how representation, order, connectedness and grounds were entan-
system is indeed always unconscious since it was there before the sig- gled in particular ideological commitments and projections. Early
nification, since it is within it that the signification resides and on the
basis of it that it becomes effective: 6° But if the unconscious is some- "' Carl Gustav Carus, Psyche, On the Development of the Soul. Part One: The Unconscious
thing that is everywhere implicit in the nineteenth century, but emerges (Dallas, '1'X: Spring Publications, 1970), 1.
Jurgen I lahermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press,
into consciousness in the twentieth (and becomes clearer still in the
1990), 262 3. I labermas notes too that Schelling's conception of madness as the
other of reason had again been absent from Madness and Civilisation.
58 Ibid., 364. 59 Ibid., 374. 60 Ibid., 362. n' Foucault, The Order of Things, 369.
 22 Introduction The liberal unconscious 23

nineteenth-century debates about the 'order of things' inherit not only In particular, this book sets out to demonstrate the close relationship
the mantle of an epistemological crisis, but also an ontological mission between the invention of a psychic unconscious and the new clamour
linked to concrete moral and political claims. The formative debates of in the Romantic period for descriptions of an autonomous, self-creat-
idealism and Romanticism occurred during the period of the French ing individual, which was to be so significant for later forms of liberal
Revolution; their convictions were tested, in Germany, by the sub- ideology."
sequent invasion of German states by Napoleonic forces. Alongside The unconscious, insofar as it forms the basis for a new science of the
their radical questioning and refounding of epistemological struc- individual mind (in part philosophical and transcendental, in part nat-
tures, German thinkers explicitly applied themselves to the question of ural-scientific, in part a form of moral self-description) is prima facie
human freedom and to the possibility of describing a human order on not detachable from nineteenth-century attempts to give an account of
grounds finally detached from the heritage of political absolutism. As autonomy, originality and independence in the individual, or the wider
will emerge in Chapter 1, the task of probing the transcendental origins desire to find new languages and new conceptions of human and social
and coherence of knowledge for a thinker such as Fichte is substantially order. It is useful to look again at Zaretsky's suggestion that people have
bound up, first of all, with reaction against a perceived dogmatism or drawn on Freudian psychoanalysis in the twentieth century 'to help
moral slavery in human experience, and secondly with the pursuit of an recast the promise of individual autonomy', which encompasses 'the
alternative basis on which to theorise human unity, one which, as with freedom to think one's own thoughts and to decide for oneself what
Kant, is to be found within oneself, rather than imposed from above or to do with one's life', and, furthermore, that autonomy is no longer
patterned on the unrationalised conventions of the past. restricted to the sphere of morality but applies as well to 'creativity, love
and happiness'." The freedom of thought and the self-direction and
The liberal unconscious
creation of one's own life, as well as the idealisation of love, are of course
the leitmotifs of Romantic philosophical, moral and aesthetic debate.
The first Idea is naturally the notion of my self as an absolutely free being." Already in the 1790s, writers in Germany were strenuously pursuing
Both Foucault and Marquard are concerned to make a point about the the implications of subjective freedom raised by the Enlightenment,
emergence of modernity. They both bring psychoanalysis back into and particularly the ramifications of that idea for personal and psycho-
contact with a period in which the unconscious began to carry a new logical life. The core argument of this book is that the increasing inter-
structural weight in the depiction of individual life, and they redefine est in an unconscious psyche reflects not simply the attempt to produce
the significance of psychoanalysis itself within that broader historical an adequate account of the phenomena of interior life, but also a con-
framework. And yet they detach their accounts from what one would cern with establishing the possibility of a self-caused self, or a self the
think are the most prominent and long-lasting features of ideological logic of whose development is irreducibly detached from more system-
shift in this period: the socio-political pressure to overcome the vestiges atic forms of explanation, or from the idea of its manipulation by exter-
of feudalism and absolute government; and the revised moral and spir- nal authorities or other determining causes. Such ideas would have an
itual vocabularies occasioned by Enlightenment pressure on religious immense (if contested) appeal, particularly within liberal theories of
tradition. This book argues that any changes in the way the structure of individuality, and thus at the broadest level this book is concerned with
experience, subjectivity and inner life is theorised at the opening of the attempts to describe a stable 'basis' to the self in the nineteenth century
nineteenth century must be read in that double context. By doing so, I and beyond, into the domain of psychoanalysis itself.
believe one can gain a new perspective on the foundation of the uncon-
scious, and the unconscious as a foundation, which is worked theor-
" See, for instance, Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 67,
etically into the heart of processes affecting the life of the individual. 125: 'the notion of self-development is ... typically Romantic in origin' and fur-
thermore represents one of the 'three faces of liberty or freedom'. Likewise Andrew
Vincent remarks on the 'fortuitous alliance of Romantic self-choice (Bildung) with
the traditions of epistemological individualism and classical liberalism' in modernity.
64 'Oldest System Programme of German Idealism' [1796], authorship attributed vari- Andrew Vincent, 'Liberalism and Postmodernism', in James Meadowcraft (ed.), The
ously to F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel or Friedrich Holderlin, trans. Andrew Liberal l'olitical 'tradition (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), 142.
Bowie, in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 265. "" Zurcisky, Secrets of the Soul, 9.
24 Introduction The liberal unconscious 25

Many accounts of liberalism, and of an associated concern with the requirement of the system'. 74 Alexis de Tocqueville famously parodied
free development of individual life in Western thought, mark a trans- this individualising aspect of the emergence of modern democracy, in
formation in the culture of individuality effectively at this same point which 'people form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and
in post-Revolutionary Europe — where freedom and self-development imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands', and in which 'each
become constellated as part of an emerging vocabulary of self, in reaction man is forever thrown back on himself alone'. 75 However, this critique is
against eighteenth-century absolutism and rationalism. Importantly, nowadays commonly associated with its inverse, accepted as being part
this shift in the envisaged role of individuality concerns not so much the of the ontological core of liberalism, taken in this wider cultural sense,
emergence of political movements (though it has inevitably accompanied and a key aspect of the modern idea of freedom.
them) but the elaboration of a complex set of ideas — moral, metaphys- The important thing to note here is not that the nineteenth cen-
ical, ontological — about the qualities of selfhood, which are gradually tury sees the birth in Germany of a self-consciously political 'liberal'
worked into traditions of broader liberal theory, becoming part of the movement (what liberalising tendencies there are at this point are
world view of post-Enlightenment modernity. 67 For John Gray, essen- short-lived and remain tied to strong notions of the state), nor a sud-
tial to an understanding of liberalism is an insight into its background den recognition of the fact of individuality as the self-evident starting
in modern European individualism — the conception of ourselves 'as point for moral and political forms of self-description (against this,
autonomous rational agents and authors of our own values'. 68 These one might consider the tendency for German or later British ideal-
features 'are fully intelligible only in the light of the several crises of ists, such as Bernard Bosanquet or F. H. Bradley, or monists such as
modernity' which include the dissolution of the feudal order in Europe Herbert Spencer, to begin with the idea of the state, society, or life in
and the French and American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth general, as a transcendent spiritual or organic fact). What does appear
century. 69 Likewise, Charles Taylor finds that 'The ethic of authenticity in the wake of the 'crises' of modernity is an intensification of a con-
is something relatively new and peculiar to modern culture', building on jectural movement towards core notions — freedom, autonomy, vital-
earlier concepts of individualism (from Locke or Descartes) but essen- ity, self-development — which are recurrently emphasised in accounts
tially born at the end of the eighteenth century. 7° People 'in the culture of the self, particularly once such terms become detached from wider
of authenticity (who have adopted that ideal)' according to Taylor, 'give idealist and Romantic assumptions about holism and pantheism. 76
support to a certain kind of liberalism'?' And again, this individualis- Onethiks,foracWlhemvonHubdt'sceiha
ing freedom — ambivalent, for Taylor, but at least symbolic of modern- each person should strive to develop himself 'from his own inmost
ity — 'was won by our breaking loose from older moral horizons', from nature, and for his own sake', or 'by his own energies, in his perfect
the larger hierarchical order, in some cases 'a cosmic order', in which individuality', 77 which was taken up in J. S. Mill's defence of originality,
people used to see themselves. 72 Terry Eagleton has associated the emer- `individuality of power', and a person 'whose desires and impulses are
gence of 'bourgeois culture' and the middle class in modernity with his own',78 and eventually in Hobhouse's belief that 'society can safely
a liberal humanism centred on the notion of an 'autonomous human be founded on this self-directing power of the personality'. 79 But the
subject'. 73 However ghostly its existence, this autonomous subject is
no mere 'metaphysical fantasy' — it remains somehow indispensable " Ibid., 374-5.
to modern culture 'partly because the subject as unique, autonomous, " Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Fontana Press, 1994), 508.
" Taylor sums these emphases up in his notion of 'authenticity' or the moral ideal
self-identical and self-determining remains a political and ideological 'of being true to oneself', The Ethics of Authenticity, 15; Edward Shils, The Virtue of
Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition and Civil Society, ed. Steven Grosby
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1997), 158, recognises a list of candidates attract-
ing liberals with a collectivist bent, including 'creative' or 'true individuality' and the
'vital self'. For Lukes, Individualism, 125, the core liberal ideas of freedom, in moder-
See Meadowcraft, The Liberal Political Tradition, 1. nity, are 'autonomy, privacy and self-development'.
n" John Gray, Liberalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 50. H Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,
"' Ibid., xi. 1093), 13.
'" Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, '" J. S. Mill, 'On Liberty', in Mary Warnock (ed.), Utilitarianism (London: Collins,
1991), 25. 1902), 180.
" Ibid., 17. ' 2 Ibid., 3. l" I.. 'I'. I tollhouse, 'L iberalism', in Liberalism and Other Writings (Cambridge University
" Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic! (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 377. Press, 1004), 50.
26 Introduction The unconscious 27

coherence or integrity of such conceptions of individuality — pitched concept of individuality itself. How should one ground the descriptions of
ambivalently as they are between a commitment to 'individualism' such self-creating individuals and their moral bases? From the start, the
and the search for a new kind of moral and political order — carries ideologues of liberal freedom were forced to draw on notions of 'constitu-
with it a new kind of crisis, which is the intellectual struggle within tion' which lay beyond the sphere of practical politics in the realms of art
liberal theory over the security of its own ideological foundations. and literature, nature philosophy, metaphysics and psychology.
Partly this insecurity is prompted by the spectre of rampant indi-
vidualism itself, as Andrew Vincent puts it: 'the bulk of liberal the-
The unconscious
ory might be described as a half-conscious holding operation against
the implicit threat of individualism'. 80 Or as Terry Eagleton observed, The unconscious and the psyche are deeply implicated in the construc-
`once the bourgeoisie has dismantled the centralising political appar- tions of selfhood which emerge from these foundational debates about
atus of absolutism, either in fantasy or reality', the question arises as freedom and individuality. The psychological individual is not sud-
to 'where it is to locate a sense of unity powerful enough to reproduce denly 'revealed' beneath the tattered cloak of religious orthodoxy at the
itself by'. 81 Eagleton's presentation of this predicament is very close to beginning of the nineteenth century as a self-evident empirical frame-
Marquard's narrative of the travels of transcendental philosophy from work for understanding mental life. It, too, is implicated in the ideo-
political history to Natur, and both shed light on Tocqueville's earlier logical search for new foundations, which accompanies 'the conception
observation that 'the concept of unity becomes an obsession' in demo- of ourselves as autonomous rational agents and authors of our own
cratic culture, to such an extent that the Germans were 'introducing values'. 84 Because of this, the unconscious and the psyche are quickly
pantheism into philosophy'. 82 Schelling's own Romantic concern for caught up in speculative cross-currents of scientific, aesthetic, moral
`creative life' and the power of 'asserting one's own individuality' and political thought, where they are linked in diverse ways to the for-
is always counterbalanced by a metaphysics of nature as an organic tunes of the individual. First of all, they take on a role within psycho-
whole, and by the 1830s will have been assimilated to a much more logical description and psychiatric investigation. There are processes
reactionary conception of social order and state authority. 83 He him- within our minds and bodies which seem to operate unconsciously, and
self can hardly be classed as a liberal thinker. there are states of mind (dream, madness, poetic invention) of which we
Theories of liberalism wrestle with a second kind of insecurity, and are not wholly consciously in control. The unconscious psyche, in this
this concerns more simply how individuality can actually be 'thought', sense, is something to be reckoned with because it is part of the psych-
how it can be conceived of and theoretically underpinned without being ology of the empirical individual, the component unit of liberal theory —
reabsorbed into overarching ideas of coherence, rational order or the sys- and a part, moreover, which stirs anxieties over the liberal belief in the
tem, but equally without unleashing the threat of fragmentation. Notions societal role of reason.
of individuality have to be defended not only in relation to the State, but Secondly, the unconscious and the psyche also function as tacit
also against the need to argue from universal principles, with little sensi- forms of holism operating across a community of individuals: there are
tivity for the kind of contingent or 'individual' factors which the demands psychic and unconscious aspects of mind which reveal our grounded-
for private, inward and autonomous development of the self seemed to ness in wider processes of nature, empirically (theories of instinct, for
require. Quite apart from nineteenth-century struggles over politically instance) or spiritually and mystically. Once the individual is notionally
diverse freedoms such as the extension of the political franchise, the free- amputated from the organic body of society," versions of the uncon-
ing of economic markets, or freedom of the press — all of which involve scious start to reconceive that greater organic body in such a way that
notions of the 'freedom of the individual' — there is a struggle over the moral and political anxieties concerning fragmentation are allayed,
though without wholly compromising the experience of self-directed-
" Vincent, 'Liberalism and Postmodernism', 139. ness within the individual.
81 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 23.

82 Tocqueville, Democracy, 451.

83 F. W. J. Schelling, 'On the Relation Between the Plastic Arts and Nature', trans. " Gray, Liberalism, 50.
A. Johnson, The Philosophy of Art; an Oration on the Relation Between the Plastic Arts "' See Noberto Bohhio's account in Liberalism and Democracy (London: Verso,
and Nature (London: John Chapman, 1845), 4. 199(0, 4 3.
Another Random Scribd Document
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 778 CONCLUSION les désincarnés sur leur situation
actuelle, matérielle ou psychologique, ne m'inspirent qu'une
confiance très limitée, car il faudrait d'abord prouver qu'il y a des
désincarnés. Je ne partage point la robuste foi d'un des
correspondants de M. Conan Doyle, M. Hubert Wales, qui, victime
d'un anthropomorphisme naïf, écrit1 : « Les esprits ont des corps,
aussi tangibles pour eux que les nôtres le sont pour nous; ils n'ont
pas d'âge : ils ne souffrent pas; il n'y a ni riches, ni pauvres ; ils
portent des vêtements et prennent des aliments ; ils ne dorment
pas. Les Esprits, de pensées, de goûts et de sentiments similaires,
gravitent ensemble; les époux ne sont pas forcément réunis. » Je ne
puis, hélas ! être pénétré de la même conviction que mon généreux
ami W. Stead, qui, lorsque je vins le voir après qu'il eut perdu son
fils, me dit : « Pourquoi voulez-vous que je sois triste ? Je lui ai écrit
ce matin, et il va me répondre ce soir. Il est très heureux, et nous
sommes en relation quotidienne, comme jadis. » A mon humble avis,
par la métapsychique subjective la preuve de la survivance n'a pas
été donnée, mais je m'empresse d'ajouter qu'on s'en est approché
très fort. Si une preuve pouvait être fournie de la survivance de la
conscience, cette preuve eût été donnée. Mais peut-elle être
donnée? Je ne vois pas, en vérité, comment on pourrait trouver des
arguments meilleurs que les cas de Georges Pelham ou de Raymond
Lodge, et vainement je m'efforce d'imaginer des expériences plus
décisives, des observations plus probantes. A vrai dire — car il faut
être aussi réservé dans les négations que dans les affirmations —
certaines apparences sont là pour nous faire croire fortement à la
survivance des personnalités disparues. Pourquoi les médiums,
même lorsqu'ils n'ont pas lu les livres spirites, et qu'ils ne sont pas
initiés aux doctrines spirites, vont-ils immédiatement personnifier tel
ou tel mort? Pourquoi la personnalité nouvelle s'affirme-t-elle avec
tant de persistance, tant d'énergie, et même parfois tant de véracité
? Pourquoi se sépare-t-elle si nettement de la personnalité du
médium ? Toutes les paroles des grands médiums sont imprégnées,
pour ainsi dire, de la théorie d'une survivance. Apparences peut-être,
mais pourquoi ces apparences ? 1. Conan Doyle, loc. cit., 152.
 CONCLUSION 779 — Et on me pardonnera ces hésitations.
Au seuil du mystère, il est bien permis d'être troublé, et de ne pas
apporter des paroles tranchantes, décisives, faisant un ridicule
contraste avec l'incertitude angoissante qui nous étreint. Tout de
même, si nous n'avions que la métapsychique subjective, 'nous
pourrions nous arrêter à la cryptesthésie, hypothèse simple et
nécessaire qui suffît à tout expliquer. Admettons donc, comme étant
la seule proposition authentiquement démontrée, une cryptesthésie
très intense, définie par un pouvoir prodigieux de connaissance, une
sensibilité de l'âme à des vibrations subtiles qu'aucun de nos
appareils de physique ne peut constater. Nul besoin alors de faire
intervenir des forces étrangères. Et alors ma conclusion sera :
L'intelligence humaine est beaucoup plus puissante et plus sensible
qu'elle ne le croit et ne le sait. XII L'hypothèse serait très simple. Ce
ne serait même presque pas une hypothèse, que d'admettre une
extension de nos pouvoirs intellectuels. Mais nous ne pouvons guère
aller plus loin. Car plus nous essayons de comprendre cette faculté
inaccessible de la cryptesthésie, moins nous comprenons.
Télépathie, hyperacuité sensorielle, émanations pragmatiques, si
elles expliquent quelques phénomènes, ne les expliquent pas tous ;
loin de là ! et nous devons en désespoir de cause reconnaître que de
la cryptesthésie nous ne savons que ses effets ; car ses modalités et
son mécanisme nous échappent absolument. Le passage de la
métapsychique subjective à la métapsychique objective n'est pas
aussi abrupt qu'on peut le croire; car enfin, pour qu'il y ait une
sensation cryptesthésique, il faut un phénomène extérieur
quelconque, probablement une vibration, puisque c'est par des
vibrations (de l'éther ?) que se transmettent les énergies. Donc, s'il y
a notion cryptesthésique, c'est qu'il y a eu une force extérieure qui a
agi. Les monitious (de mort ou autres) ne s'expliquent que par cette
vibration (de nature inconnue) qui a frappé notre subconscience.
 780 CONCLUSION Donc il faut qu'il y ait quelque chose eu
dehors de nous qui ait agi sur nous. Ce quelque chose qui est en
dehors de nous, et qui ébranle notre moi subconscient, est objectif.
Nos instruments ne peuvent rien enregistrer, mais il importe peu,
c'est objectif tout de même. Et alors intervient cet étrange pouvoir
de symbolisation qui est une des pierres angulaires de la
métapsychique. Pour qu'une notion quelconque soit comprise par
nous, elle doit prendre une forme accessible à notre intelligence
consciente. Par exemple la mort de A ne sera comprise par B,
conscient, que si elle lui est indiquée par une représentation
intelligible. Alors la notion parvenue à l'état fruste, comme une
ébauche informe, que A est mort, se visualise,
souslaformed'unfantôme, ou s'extériorise sous la forme d'une voix,
et des détails sont ajoutés, multiples, incohérents parfois, parfois
très synthétiques, qui complètent la notion fruste. Ces symboles
qu'on est tenté de considérer comme ayant une réalité n'ont en soi
aucune réalité ; ils ne sont que la traduction (par un symbole) d'une
notion particulière qui éveille notre cryptesthésie. Même quand il y a
hallucination collective, comme dans les maisons hantées, alors que
le même personnage apparaît successivement à diverses personnes,
sous la même apparence, il n'est pas prouvé qu'il y ait fantôme
extérieur réel. C'est peut être parce que la symbolisation par deux
percipients différents s'est exercée de la même manière. Et bien
entendu il ne s'agit ici que d'hypothèses. Je ne me laisse pas
décevoir par le mirage des mots. La cryptesthésie n'est qu'un mot
qui ne dissimule même pas notre ignorance. Dire qu'il y a eu
cryptesthésie, ce n'est aucunement résoudre les questions
troublantes, très troublantes, auxquelles nous ne pouvons répondre
: problèmes que la métapsychique future éclaircira peut-être, si elle
consent à rester strictement expérimentale. 1° Ya-t-il une
cryptesthésie rudimentaire chez tous les individus, quels qu'ils
soient? 2° Pourquoi, chez certains médiums, est-elle aussi
développée ? Pourquoi l'hypnotisme la favorise-t-elle ? 8° Pourquoi,
dans les séances spiritiques, dès le début de ces expériences, le
médium a-t-il une invincible tendance à admettre
 CONCLUSION 781 un guide, qui semble avoir une
intelligence distincte de lui? 4° Pourquoi, chez les grands médiums, y
a-t-il presque constamment association entre les phénomènes
objectifs (matérialisations, télékinésies) et les phénomènes subjectifs
(cryptesthésie) ? 5° Par quelles voies la connaissance des choses
arrive-t-elle, en dehors des sens, à l'intelligence humaine? Est-ce
l'intelligence humaine dont la vibration se transporte? Ou bien les
choses vontelles en vibrant au-devant de notre intelligence? 6° Faut-
il supposer qu'il s'agit seulement de l'intelligence humaine, et que
d'autres intelligences n'interviennent pas ; celles des morts, ou celles
des anges, démons, Dieux ? Dans l'état actuel de notre
embryonnaire science, ce sont ta des problèmes insolubles. Je me
suis arrêté aux faits : je ne veux pas me laisser entraîner au-delà. Je
ne condamne pas la théorie spirite. A coup sûr elle est prématurée :
probablement elle est erronée. Mais elle aura eu l'immense mérite
de provoquer les expériences. C'est une de ces hypothèses de travail
que Claude Bernard considérait comme si fécondes. En tout cas, au
moins provisoirement, comme cette théorie n'est rien moins que
prouvée, qu'elle est fragile, inconsistante, incohérente, nous nous
contenterons de dire, sans vouloir ni pouvoir pénétrer plus avant,
qu'il y a des voies de connaissance transcendentale, que nous ne
pouvons pas en limiter l'étendue; que par conséquent nous devons
attribuer à cette connaissance supérieure dont quelquefois paraît
doué le cerveau humain toutes les puissances que les spirites ont
attribuées aux esprits. Nous allons examiner bientôt si les
matérialisations, les télékinésies, n'apporteront pas quelque appui à
la théorie spirite ; mais d'ores et déjà nous pouvons dire que, par les
faits subjectifs seuls, la démonstration n'est pas faite. Même, ce qui
est assez désespérant, on ne voit pas comment elle pourrait être
faite, comment se pourra prouver que la conscience humaine survit
à la mort du cerveau, avec ses souvenirs et sa personnalité. Mais
cependant un immense pas en avant a été fait : car on a pu établir
que tout un monde de forces, quelquefois accessibles, vibre autour
de nous. Ces forces, nous n'en soupçonnons pas la nature ; nous
n'en voyons que les effets. Mais ces effets sont si nets que nous
 782 CONCLUSION pouvons affirmer la réalilé de ces forces.
Si quelques médiums, quelques somnambules, peuvent savoir ce
que leurs sens ne leur ont pas appris, c'est qu'il y a venant jusqu'à
eux des forces (inconnues) qui ébranlent leur sensibilité. Et c'est tout
ce que nous pouvons dire aujourd'hui . XIII Par conséquent les
phénomènes que nous appelons subjectifs ne sont subjectifs qu'en
apparence. Il y a toujours, avant tout phénomène cryptesthésique,
une force extérieure qui l'a provoqué, une vibration (inconnue) qui a
mis en jeu ces énergies latentes de notre intelligence humaine,
laquelle, ignore toute sa puissance. XIV Il y a autre chose que la
métapsychique subjective. Il ne s'agit plus maintenant d'une énorme
hyperacuité et d'une profondeur mystérieuse de notre intelligence ; il
y a l'action de notre intelligence sur la matière. Et l'obscurité, déjà
terrifiante lorsqu'il s'agit d'intensifier démesurément la cryptesthésie,
devient plus terrifiante encore. Nous devons admettre — car les faits
sont là — qu'il y a des mouvements à distance, et, quelque étrange
que soit ce phénomène, ce n'est pas le plus étrange : c'est même le
plus élémentaire de toute cette science embryonnaire et redoutable.
Qu'une force mécanique (de nature inconnue) émane du corps
humain pour mouvoir une table, et ébranler par des coups les ais
d'une planche, c'est à la rigueur compréhensible! Mais que cette
force produise des sonorités verbales, des lumières, des formes
humaines vivantes, voilà ce qui dépasse toutes nos conceptions. Une
main chaude et vivante, une bouche qui parle, des yeux qui
regardent, et une pensée qui vibre, comme font la main, la bouche,
les yeux et la pensée d'une personne humaine, ce sont des
phénomènes qui confondent. Nous sommes en pleines ténèbres.
Déjà en métapsychique objective nous ne comprenions guère
comment, à trois mille kilomètres de distance, Banca, à la même
minute où sa famille va périr , parle
 CONCLUSION 783 de mort guettant sa famille, comment le
chevalier de Figueroa peut voir, six mois avant l'événement, un
paysan, vêtu de noir, frapper la croupe d'un mulet pour le laisser
monter un escalier tordu. Mais, quand il s'agit de métapsychique
objective, c'est bien plus effrayant encore. La métapsychique
objective est le mystère, le mystère absolu, et les tentatives
d'explication qu'on hasarde paraissent assez puériles. Pourtant on
n'a pas le droit de soustraire ces faits à l'investigation scientifique. La
science métapsychique passera certainement par des phases
diverses. Elle est encore, à l'heure présente, dans une période
d'enfantement, mais c'est déjà beaucoup qu'on ait établi les faits ;
car ils sont, comme on vient de le voir, solidement établis, et trop
évidents pour être niés. Malheureusement ils ne constituent pas
encore un ensemble permettant à une doctrine de s'édifier, sérieuse.
Il faut pourtant saus timidité et sans orgueil — un orgueil que
rendrait bien ridicule notre débilité intellectuelle — examiner ce
qu'on peut inférer de toutes ces observations stupéfiantes, de toutes
ces expériences extraordinaires. Or pour ce qui est des
matérialisations et des télékinésies, nous résumerons notre opinion
ainsi : Ces phénomènes peuvent être attribués à des puissances
énergétiques d'origine humaine. XV Grâce à Ochorowicz, Schrknck-
Notzing, Mad. Bisson, Crawford, qui ont continué l'œuvre de
Crookes, il semble maintenant à peu près prouvé que les
matérialisations sont des ectoplasmes, c'est-àdire des expansions
sarcodiques sortant du corps humain (des médiums) absolument
comme l'expansion pseudopodique sort de la cellule amibienne. Tous
les zoologistes savent que l'amibe a un sarcode qui peut se projeter
au dehors pour saisir des parcelles alimentaires et s'incorporer les
objets voisins. De même, dans la trance médianimique, du corps du
médium peuvent sortir des filaments fluidiques, des expansions en
forme de nuages, ou de voiles, ou de tiges, qui vont s'organiser et
prendre l'apparence de membres humains, parfois même de corps
humains tout entiers.
 784 . CONCLUSION Ces ectoplasmes, à une première phase
de leur action, sont invisibles, et cependant ils sont déjà capables de
mouvoir des objets, de donner des raps dans une table. Plus tard, ils
deviennent visibles, quoique nuageux et ne constituant que des
ébauches. Plus tard encore, ils ont des formes humaines, car ils ont
la propriété extraordinairedechangerde forme, de consistance,
etd'évoluer sous nos yeux. En quelques secondes cet embryon
nébuleux, qui sort du corps du médium, devient un être véritable,
alors que l'oeuf embryonnaire, pour évoluer et devenir un être
adulte, a besoin de trente années. Quelquefois même le fantôme
apparaît tout d'un coup, brusquement, sans avoir passé par la phase
de nébulosité lumiueuse. Mais c'est probablement un phénomène du
même ordre. Cette formation ectoplasmique aux dépens de
l'organisme anatomo-physiologique du médium est maintenant hors
de toute contestation. Et c'est prodigieusement étrange,
prodigieusement inhabituel, prodigieusement invraisemblable.
Pourtant on est forcé de se rallier à l'évideuce des faits. Je suis
convaincu que, dans vingtcinq ans, la science officielle classique
admettra la télékinésie et l'ectoplasmie comme des phénomènes
incontestés. La transformation profonde des idées qui s'est faite à ce
sujet depuis les vingt-cinq dernières années m'autorise à cette
conviction. XVI Or il ne suffit pas d'avoir constaté les faits ; il faut
avoir le courage d'en essayer une théorie quelconque, qui sera
nécessairement imparfaite. Nous avons vu que, pour la
métapsychique subjective, l'explication la plus rationnelle, la plus
simple, était de supposer une faculté de connaissance supra-
normale, celle que nous avons appelée la cryptesthésie, à savoir
l'ébranlement de l'intelligence humaine par certaines vibrations qui
n'émeuvent pas nos sens normaux. Eh bien ! pour la métapsychique
objective, nous arrivons à admettre que l'explication la plus
rationnelle, la plus simple, est assez analogue, c'est-à-dire qu'on
peut supposer à l'organisme humain uue faculté de projection au
dehors, autrement dit une
 CONCLUSION 785 sorte d'ectoplasmisation, ou émission
d'une substance matérielle capable de s'organiser. Par conséquent,
l'hypothèse la plus vraisemblable, c'est qu'il y a dans notre corps des
forces capables de s'extérioriser. Mais, cette hypothèse, quoique
étant la plus simple, n'est pas simple du tout : c'est une physiologie,
une physique, une chimie nouvelles. Des êtres à forme humaine qui
naissent et meurent dans des voiles blancs, qui se forment et
s'évanouissent comme des nuages, ce ne sont pas des êtres
humains. L'homme est si proche de l'animalité que tout ce qui est le
propre d'un être humain doit aussi, au moins partiellement, être
accordé aux autres animaux. Nous n'avons aucune fonction
essentielle dont soit dépourvu un mammifère quelconque, voire un
vertébré, voire un invertébré. Les processus de génération, de
circulation, de nutrition, de digestion sont à peu près les mêmes. La
différence entre l'homme et l'animal, c'est que l'homme a une
intelligence un peu plus aiguë, un peu plus vaste, capable
d'abstraction, de souvenir et d'analyse. Mais enfin cette différence
n'est pas essentielle. L'homme possède un plus haut degré
d'intelligence, voilà tout. C'est un animal très intelligent, mais c'est
un animal. Or transformer la matière, devenir un être vivant
transitoire, créer des matières vivantes transitoires, c'est tout un
monde nouveau. Nous évoluons dans un autre ordre de grandeurs.
L'homme alors n'est plus l'homme. Il n'appartient plus au règne
animal. Il sort même du monde mécanique où nous nous mouvons,
monde où la chimie, la physique, et la mathématique régnent
souverainement. Tout est possible. Les pouvoirs de notre personne
humaine, morale ou matérielle, vont peut-être beaucoup plus loin
que ne le feraient croire nos habituelles et quotidiennes expériences.
Il est démontré que du corps peuvent émaner des expansions
fluidiques qui vont s'organiser, s'agréger en formes humaines. Il est
démontré que l'ectoplasmie est une des propriétés de la matière
vivante. Geley, dans un livre ingénieux, a supposé que l'inconscient
Ricbet. — Métapsychique. 50
 780 CONCLUSION était une sorte de force créatrice ; c'est
l'inconscient qui détermine les mutations histologiques par lesquelles
la larve se transforme en chrysalide, et la chrysalide en insecte
parfait. C'est l'inconscient qui produit les stigmates et les guérisons
miraculeuses. C'est l'inconscient qui fait les matérialisations. Et
certes, c'est une tentative hardie et profonde que de rattacher les
phéuomènes métapsychiques aux données les plus positives de
l'emhryologie et de la zoologie. Mais ce n'est pas, à ce qu'il semble,
introduire une explication. Cet inconscient si puissant, si
universellement répandu et efficace, c'est une force non démontrée,
c'est toujours le quid ignotum. Mais, même pour Geley, le
subconscient ne suffit pas, et il tend à admettre — sans l'affirmer —
que les phénomènes élevés et complexes du médiumnisme semblent
démontrer une direction (étrangère) une intention (étrangère) qu'on
ne peut guère rapporter au médium ou aux expérimentateurs. Telle
est l'opinion de Geley; ce n'est pas tout à fait la mienne. Donc je
dirai, avec Lodge, qu'il s'agit de choisir parmi toutes les propositions
possibles celle qui est la moins extravagante. Aucune explication, dit-
il encore, ne convient à tous les faits. Prétendre forger des
explications, c'est une entreprise aussi prématurée que l'eût été pour
Galvani d'expliquer la nature de l'Électricité. Dans son beau livre sur
la personnalité humaine, Fr. Myers a ébauché une théorie qui à
certains égards ressemble à celle de Geley ; au moins pour les
phénomènes élémentaires de la métapsychique. D'après Myers, il y a
des personnalités multiples, des centressubliminaux, qui coexistent,
travaillent, pensent, comparent, analysent, à côté du centre principal
(la conscience) qui ne les connaît pas, ouà peine. Ces centres
secondaires sont capables, plus que le centre conscient, d'être
ébranlés par les vibrations cryptesthésiques. Assurément. Mais tout
de suite, pour expliquer les phénomènes supérieurs de la
métapsycliique, Fa. Myers est forcé d'admettre formellement la
survie, et de supposer que, dans bien des cas d'écriture
automatique, ou de possession , ces centres secondaires sont
envahis par les esprits désincarnés.
 CONCLUSION 787 Plus on étudie ces phénomènes
complexes, plus on analyse, dans tous leurs détails, ces monitions,
prémonitions, hallucinations véridiques, hallucinations collectives,
plus on est enclin à l'hypothèse d'une puissance inconnue,
ectoplasmique, attribuée à l'être humain. Or cette hypothèse est
tellement étrange qu'il faut épuiser les autres hypothèses possibles.
Et tout d'abord nous pouvons supposer que d'autres êtres que
l'homme, intelligents aussi, errent autour de nous et peuvent se
mêler à nos évolutions, quoiqu'ils soient soustraits aux conditions
mécaniques, physiques, anatomiques, chimiques de notre existence.
Et pourquoi n'existerait-il pas des êtres intelligents et puissants,
distincts des mondes abordables à nos sens? De quel droit, avec nos
sens bornés, notre intelligence défectueuse, notre passé scientifique
de trois siècles à peine, oserions-nous affirmer que dans l'immense
Kosmos l'homme est le seul être intelligent, et que toute réalité
intellectuelle nécessite toujours des cellules nerveuses irriguées par
du sang oxygéné ? Qu'il y ait des forces intellectuelles autres que
celles de l'homme, construites sur un type tout différent, non
seulement cela est possible, mais c'est extrêmement probable. On
peut même prétendre que c'est certain. Il est absurde de supposer
que la seule intelligence de la nature, c'est la nôtre ; et que
fatalement toute force intelligente est organisée sur le mode animal
ou humain, avec un cerveau pour organe. On voit tout de suite
combien le mystère est profond. Car, lorsque nous parlons
d'intelligence, nous supposons implicitement, dans notre conception
fatalement anthropomorphique des choses, que cette intelligence est
avec mémoire, avec logique, avec terminologie verbale, avec
affectivité. Or l'intelligence (dans le sens humain) c'est quelque
chose de si imparfait, de si spécial à l'humanité, que nous ne
pouvons guère apprécier les forces intelligentes qu'en les assimilant
plus ou moins à celles de l'homme, ce qui est probablement une
grave erreur. Dire : un ange est intelligent (dans le sens humain),
c'est à peu près aussi légitime que si un morceau de drap rouge
disait : un ange est rouge. L'idée que nous nous faisons des esprits,
qu'il s'agisse de leurs
 788 CONCLUSION formes ou de leurs pensées, est donc
toujours d'un grossier anthropomorphisme ; mais cet
anthropomorphisme grossier est nécessaire. Tout de même allons au
bout de notre pensée, et sans frayeur, puisque nous sommes dans le
domaine de l'hypothèse. La cellule nerveuse est pour l'animal la
condition de l'intelligence ; mais cela ne prouve nullement que pour
tout phénomène d'intelligence il y ait nécessité d'une cellule
nerveuse, voire des éléments chimiques que nous appelons
matériels. Des mondes très différents, des êtres très différents sont
concevables, où l'intelligence existerait sans cellules nerveuses, sans
substratum matériel. La preuve que ces êtres existent n'est pas faite
; mais leur possibilité d'être est évidente. On dit : V homme ne
manifeste son intelligence que par son cerveau, donc aucune
intelligence ne peut se manifester sans cerveau. Telle est l'étonnante
logique de ceux qui nous accusent de faire œuvre contraire à la
science. Si nous admettons qu'il y a dans l'univers, en des conditions
d'espace et de temps qui sont soustraites à notre rudimentaire
psychologie, des êtres doués d'intelligence, interférant à certains
moments dans notre vie, on a tout de suite, pour beaucoup de faits
rapportés en détail dans ce livre, une hypothèse commode. Êtres
mystérieux, anges ou démons, existences amorphes, esprits qui
cherchent par moments à intervenir dans nos actes, qui peuvent, par
des voies absolument inconnues, manier la matière à leur gré, qui
dirigent quelques-unes de nos pensées, qui se mêlent à
quelquesunes de nos destinées, et qui, pour se faire connaître de
nous — car sans cela nous ne les comprendrions pas — prennent V
aspect matériel et psychologique despersonnalités humaines ayant
disparu, cest une manière simpliste d'énoncer et de comprendre la
plupart des phénomènes métapsy chiques. D'autant plus que très
souvent, dès qu'on analyse un peu profondément les faits de
monitions et de prémonitions, il semble bien y avoir, en dehors de
nous et loin de nous, de vagues intentions , intentions qui dépassent
nos conceptions humaines, comme si les forces intelligentes
voulaient s'arrêter au seuil du mystère, ne consentant pas à tout
dire, parlant par énigmes et symboles,
 CONCLUSION 789 ébauchant de nuageuses affirmations,
alors qu'elles eussent pu être plus explicites, remuant des assiettes,
des tables, des bûches, alors qu'il leur eût été possible — au moins
d'après les données de notre habituelle intelligence — de nous
fournir des preuves plus intéressantes, d'opérer dans un laboratoire
de physique, et surtout de nous renseigner sur les mystères de leur
vie continuée après la mort du corps. Mais ils restent dans la fumée
d'une théosophie verbeuse ; ne nous disent jamais rien d'utile ; ne
nous indiquent même pas, avec quelque précision, les conditions
favorables à l'expérimentation. Que ces esprits soient les
consciences d es êtres humains défunts c'est à la rigueur possible,
mais j'oserai dire, avec toutes les prudences qu'impose une négation
quelconque, ce riest guère probable. L'âme de ces désincarnés est
trop fondamentalement différente de l'âme des défunts, pour que ce
puisse être la même. Et quant à la matière, comment, après trois
ans de séjour dans un cercueil, un cadavre désagrégé pourrait-il plus
facilement retrouver les vieux vêtements qu'il portait de son vivant,
que reconstituer son cœur, son foie, et sa cornée, qui sont devenus
une bouillie informe. Si donc — ce que d'ailleurs je ne puis croire —
il y a des esprits doués de pouvoirs mystérieux (que je ne
comprends nullement) et d'intentions mystérieuses (que je ne
comprends pas davantage), en tout cas ces esprits ne sont pas les
consciences des défunts. Ils appartiennent à d'autres mondes,
différents de notre monde matériel aussi bien que de notre monde
moral, et, s'ils revêtent des apparences humaines, c'est afin de
pouvoir se faire comprendre fragmentairement à nous1. 1. Afin de
rendre dans une certaine mesure acceptable cette hypothèse qui
paraît monstrueuse, imaginons que l'homme n'en sait pas beaucoup
plus sur l'univers qu'une république de fourmis n'en sait de la
planète-terre qu'elles habitent. Elles ne savent pas qu'il y a des êtres
qui leur sont bien supérieurs comme force et comme intelligence ;
elles ignorent qu'il y a des mers, des vaisseaux, des bibliothèques,
des téléphones, des théâtres, des armées, des tribunaux et des
étoiles. Elles vivent comme si tout se limitait dans l'univers à
quelques brindilles de bois, des mousses, de vieux troncs d'arbre,
des pucerons qui les nourrissent, et des ruisselets d'eau qui inondent
leur fourmilière. Si une fourmi plus sagace que les autres leur vient
dire qu'il y a d'autres mondes que ceux-là, cette fourmi, malgré sa
sagacité, sera sans doute taxée de folie, et on n'aura pas de peine,
dans la république formicienne, à prouver sod incohérence
intellectuelle. Et alors, étant convaincu, que, tout compte fait, nous
sommes, dans le
 790 • CONCLUSION En résumé il y a trois hypothèses : 1°
ce sont les morts, dont les consciences, au lieu de disparaître, ont
continué à exister (sans substratum matériel) : c'est la théorie
spirite, celle qui me paraît la moins vraisemblable ; 2° il y a des
anges, des esprits (Sàipueç) qui, puissants mécaniquement et
psychologiquement, interviennent dans les affaires humaines ; 3°
l'intelligence humaine (âme et corps), est assez puissante pour
produire aussi bien les manifestations matérielles (ectoplasmies) que
les manifestations subjectives (cryptesthésies), qui nous stupéfient.
Si j'admets, comme manifestement préférable aux deux autres, cette
troisième hypothèse, ce n'est pas que j'y croie bien fort. Loin de là.
Je sens combien elle est fragile, et ridicule, et presque aussi ridicule
que les deux autres. Mais quoi! Avons-nous mieux? Peut-être. Et
pour ma part, j'adopte sans réserve une quatrième proposition ;
celle qui a toutes chances d'être la vraie : nous n'avons encore
aucune hypothèse sérieuse à présenter. En définitive je crois à
l'hypothèse inconnue qui sera celle de l'avenir, hypothèse que je ne
puis formuler, car je ne la connais pas. XVII Des faits effarants
vibrent autour de nous, qui semblent tout d'abord en étrange
dysharmonie avec les vérités acquises. Eh bien ! non. Puisque les
faits sont là, la dysharmonie ne peut être qu'apparente,
conséquence fatale de notre ignorance. Or cette ignorance ne sera
pas perpétuelle. Un jour viendra, qui n'est pas très loin peutêtre, où
une découverte inattendue ouvrira des horizons nouveaux. Un
savant génial, un médium puissant, un hasard heureux, en voilà
assez pour que surgisse aussitôt toute une série de vérités
nouvelles, d'où sortiront non seulement des solutions nouvelles,
mais aussi des problèmes nouveaux, problèmes dont nous n'avons
pas la moindre idée à l'heure actuelle. Kosmos, beaucoup moins
encore qu'une troupe de fourmis sur la planète terrestre, je penche,
sans preuves solides d'ailleurs, à croire qu'il existe d'autres univers
que notre petit univers physico-chimique. C'est une supposition qui
est surprenante, sans être invraisemblable.
 CONCLUSION 791 XVIII Tout sera beaucoup plus
surprenant, beaucoup plus inattendu que nos médiocres
imaginations ne peuvent le rêver. Nous devons nous dire que la
science sera transformée de fond en comble, au delà de tout ce que
les plus téméraires peuvent concevoir. Il faudra procéder résolument,
par des méthodes scientifiques exactes, avec aussi peu de timidité
que de crédulité. Ayons foi dans le pouvoir magique de la science.
Essayons de nous représenter la mentalité humaine aux temps de
Pahacelse et de Gutenberg, c'està-dire il y a quatre cents ans. Douze
générations humaines, c'est bien peu pour avoir transformé le
monde ! La chimie est une science admirable qui connaît les
évolutions les plus secrètes des atomes, qui peut indiquer la place
que ces impondérables, en s'unissaut, occupent dans l'espace pour
créer des substauces nouvelles. Et pourtant la chimie a débuté par
l'Alchimie, sœur de l'Astrologie. Si j'avais vécu au xve siècle, j'aurais
peut-être eu confiance dans l'Alchimie et l'Astrologie. J'aurais bien
fait, puisque l'Alchimie est devenue la Chimie, et l'Astrologie est
devenue l'Astronomie. Aujourd'hui ma confiance est absolue en la
Métapsychique, et je crois bien qu'il ne lui faudra pas quatre cents
ans pour aboivljij^jà une science aussi précise que la Chimie
actuelle. Cependant une difficulté se présente, que les autres
sciences n'ont pas eu à. vaincre, qui est spéciale à la métapsychique,
et très grave. En effet celte science semble s'adresser non, plus à
des forces aveugles, mais à des, forces intelligentes, c'est-à-dire
capables de fantaisies, d'intentions (hostiles peut-être). Et alors
comment attaquer le problème ? Tout devient très aléatQJf^^^
evued : Heureusement il n'est guère probable que ces forces
intelligentes ne sont pas soumises à des lois, et par conséquent
abordables à nos recherches. Ce sont ces lois qu'il s'agira de
connaître. Qui sait si, au lieu d'être, comme il a semblé jusqu'ici,
empêchés par ces intelligences mêmes d'arriver à leur
connaissance,, nous ne serons pas aidés par elles? i
 792 CONCLUSION En tout cas, déjà, par les faits épars et
nombreux qui ont été recueillis, on peut se rendre compte qu'une
mentalité nouvelle inspirera les sociétés humaines à mesure que la
métapsychique fera des progrès. Nous étions parfois disposés à
croire que les faits matériels constatés et étudiés par les savants
sont tout, et déjà nous étions tentés d'assigner quelque limite, pas
très lointaine, à toute notre actuelle science. Des microscopes, des
thermomètres, des télescopes, des galvanomètres plus délicats et
plus précis ! tel était à peu près notre très médiocre horizon. Mais à
présent notre espérance est beaucoup plus vaste. Voici que nous
entrevoyons tout un monde inexploré, plein de mystère encore,
devant lequel nous restons muets et stupides, ainsi qu'un Hottentot
devant les tourbillons dePomcARÉ, les ondes de Hertz, les microbes
de Pasteur ou la relativité d'ElNSTEIN. Ce monde nouveau, c'est
l'inconnu, c'est l'avenir, c'est l'espoir1. Comme Fréd. MYERset Oliver
Lodge l'ont admirablement indiqué, peut-être une nouvelle
conception du devoir humain se dégagerat-elle de ces études à
peine ébauchées. Rien ne peut nous faire prévoir le bouleversement
que la métapsychique va produire dans nos idées sur les fins
dernières de l'homme. Certes la science des atomes et des forces
matérielles, attraction, chaleur, électricité, affinités chimiques, ne
sera pas bouleversée ; car les bases en sont inébranlables. Mais on y
aura peut-être ajouté de grandes choses nouvelles. Et [puis la
finalité de l'homme sera peut-êtfe mieux comprise. Elle ne restera
plus autant qu'autrefois enfouie dans les nuages de l'impénétrable, si
nous avons pu introduire dans la science positive quelques-uns des
faits les plus cohérents de cette science nouvelle. Or à l'heure
actuelle, quand tout est ténèbres encore, notre devoir est tout tracé.
Soyons sobres de toute spéculation vaine : 1. Pascal Ta dit en
termes profonds. « Les secrets de la, nature sont cachés ;
quoiqu'elle agisse toujours, on ne découvre pas toujoufs ses effets ;
le temps les révèle d'âge en âge... Sans contredire les anciens, nous
pouvons affirmer le contraire de ce qu'ils disaient, et, quelque force
qu'ait cette antiquité, la vérité doit toujours avoir l'avantage, quoique
nouvellement découverte, puisqu'elle est toujours plus ancienne que
toutes les opinions qu'on a eues. » [Fragment d'un traité sur le vide,
Ed. Havet, II, 273.)
 CONCLUSION 793 approfondissons et analysons les faits :
mettons autant de rigueur dans l'expérimentation que d'audace dans
l'hypothèse. Alors la Métapsychique sortira de l'Occultisme, comme
la Chimie s'est dégagée de l'Alchimie. Et nul ne peut prévoir quelle
en sera l'étonnante destinée. Tout de même il ne faut pas se faire
trop d'illusions. Les fragments de vérités incomprises que nous
présente la science de l'occulte nous montrent la misère de notre
humaine intelligence. L'astronome, en étudiant les astres, est bien
vite convaincu que l'homme est un être prodigieusement infime. De
même, dans la métapsychique, quand de pâles et fugitives lueurs
nous révèlent des mondes intellectuels frémissant autour de nous, et
en nous, nous sentons que ces mondes nous resteront, pour
toujours peutêtre, aussi lointains et incompréhensibles que les
étoiles incompréhensibles et lointaines qui peuplent la voûte céleste.
Mais ce n'est pas une raison pour ne pas redoubler nos efforts et nos
labeurs. Il y a là de grands mystères à approfondir. La tâche est si
belle que, même si elle doit échouer, l'honneur de l'avoir entreprise
donne quelque prix à la vie.
 INDEX ALPHABÉTIQUE DES NOMS Abbott (David), 573,
581. Abélard, 86. Abelous, 147. Abronowski, 2?9. Adam (M- J.), 325,
355. Adam (Paul), 468. Adams, 426, 427, 727. Adamson, 148. Adare
(Vie), 612, 618-622. Agda Olsen, 154. Aggazotti, 536. Agnès
(Sainte), 692. Agrippa (Cornélius), 15, 19. Aischa, 643-647.
Akoutine, 740. Aksakoff, 6, 30, 38, 41, 193, 271, 278, 279, 341, 529,
532, 574, 597, 627, 684. 689, 702, 707, 709, 740, 741 761. Albertis,
698. Alesi (H. d'}, 97. Alexander, 395. Alexandra, 474. Alexandrine,
465. Alexis (Didier), 26, 142, 143, 461. Alice, 46, 83, 134, 151, 152,
154, 155, 157-161. 461-463, 760. Allams, 278. Allan-Kardec, 32, 33,
383. Alliot, 222. Allom, 356. Aima Haemmerlé, 708. — 154, 155.
Alphonse XIII, 497. — (de Liguori), 20, 701. Alrutz (Sidney), 122.
Amicis (de), 638. Ammien Marcellin, 23. Ampère (A.-M.), 585.
Amyot, 19. Andrade (M-« d'), 672, 677. Andrée, 63, 75, 77. Andrews
(Miss), 116. Anna (Tante), 428. — 146, 147. Anthony (D'), 466.
Antoine (B.), 467. Apollonius, 19. Applesby, 338. Apte, 21. Arago,
484. Arbonsoff, 356. Aresky, 590, 643, 644, 650. Argentine, 669.
Arpentigny, 226. Aristote, 2, 258. Arren (d'), 673. Arriola (Pepito).
10, 279. Ars (Curé d'), 693. Arsonval (d'), 529, 536, 562, 585. Artus,
133. Assagioli, 297-299. Athénodore, 727, 728. Aub, 198. Aubry (G.),
192. — (F.), 192. Audenino, 537. Avellino, 636. Aylesbury, 322, 429,
438. Azam, 36, 83, 220. Babinet, 31, 283. Babinski, 119. Bachelot,
337. Bacherini, 508. Backer, 133. Backmann (D.), 154, 155. Baeschly,
358. Baggalli, 538. Bagot (M""), 305, 347. Bailey, 583, 591, 601,
608. Baker (Bichard). — (M«"), 471. Baldwin, 173. Baie (Miss), 479.
 796 INDEX ALPHABETIQUE DES NOMS Balfour (Gérard),
21b, 216. Bail, 356. Balle, 149. Balsamo (S.), 471. Bangs, 577.
Banister, 450. Baraduc. 121, 556, 557, 613, 709. Bard, 326, 407,
408. Baréty, 121. Barker, 357, 358, 501. — (Eisa), 95, 359. Barklay
(M-8), 656. Barr (Miss), 325. Barrau (Mme de), 428. Barrett (sir
William), 6, 29, 37, 38, 103, 122, 190, 205, 209, 210, 276, 381, 289,
552, 570, 571, 749, 750, 752, 761. Bartolini (T.), 194. Barwell, 311.
Barzini, 605. Baschieri (U.), 194, 542. Basserolle, 365, 306. Baucher,
133. Baudouin (M.), 338, 339. Bathes (Effia), 186. Bayfield, 178.
Bayley, 591. Bayol, 687. Beale (Miss), 358,422, 423. Beaugrand, 326,
359. Bec, 360. Bedford (Miss), 729, 730. Beilby, 425, 438. Belbéder,
360. Bellier, 534. Belot (M-»»), 411. Benedikt, 121, 294. Benning,
707. Beresford (Lord), 359. Bergen (de), 683. Berget, 360. Berger,
246. Berisso, 537. Bernard (Claude), 7, 11, 12,82, 100, 781.
Bernheim, 36. Bernstein, 235. Berteaux, 133. Berthe, 336. Bertie,
363. Berthelon, 361. Bettany, 316, 430. Bettie, 481. Bibby (Miss),
366. Bien-Boa, 595, 599, 605, 643-648. Bigard (J.-J.), 324, 366, 367.
Bigge, 712, 715. Binet-Sanglé, 139, 341. Binns, 617. Bishop, 362,
416. Bisson (J.), 52, 559, 607, 587, 592-596, 599, 607, 627, 643,
650-657. Blackburn, 338, 619. Blackman, 29. Blake (Carter), 680.
Blanc (Denise), 446. Blavatzki (M-«), 259, 582. Bliss, 30. Bianco,
675. Bloch (Mm«), 639. Blocus (M«), 96. Bocca, 537. Bock, 365.
Bocock, 618. Bôhn, 277, 278. Bohn, 745. Boirac (E.), 41, 127, 140,
230, 600. Bois (J.), 87, 96, 364. Boisnard, 479. Boissarie, 133.
Boniface (Mm°), 364. Bonjuiski, 685. Bonnamy, 388. Bonnard
(Mm8), 185. Bonnefoy (Suzanne), 411. Bormann, 649. Bossuet, 86.
Bottazzi (F.), 38, 529, 592, 604, 606, 610, 637-758, 639, 762.
Botzaris, 273. Boucher (D'), 484. Bouillaud, 7. Bourbon (D'), 596,
651. Bourget (P.), 171. Bourneville (Dr), 21. Bourru (D'), 222, 223.
Boursnell, 586. Boutleroff, 30,341,524. Bowring, 505. Bowstear (D'),
364, 365. Boyle, 368. Bozzano (E.), 41, 185, 194, 200, 221, 268,
269, 278, 279, 323, 325, 342, 417, 436, 437, 440-508, 529, 513,
612, 613, 718740, 761. Brackett (L.), 141, 688. Braid (J.), 35.
Branen, 543. Brémon, 364, 416. Brewern, 575. Brière (D'), 569. —
de Boismont, 353. Briffaut (M™), 48, 196, 197, 198. Brighton, 325.
Briston, 745. Briggs (Vernon), 171, Brisson (H.), 484. Brittain (A.),
177. Britton, 30, 176. c
 INDEX ALPHABÉTIQUE DES NOMS 797 Broflerio, 41, 529.
Brornpton (Père), 362. Brot (M"»»), 483. Brougham (Lord), 364.
Brown, 171, 275, 686, 687, 731. — (Mary), 678, 679. —
(Marguerite), 169. Browne (James Crichton), 388. Brucato (A.), 495.
Bruce (Bob.), 702. — 384, 385. — (0'), 410. Brutus, 19, 20. Bryant,
30. Buchanan, 217. Buekloy, 140. Buguot, 583, 586. Buisson (H.),
490. Buloz (M« L.-Ch.), 352. Burcq, 224. Bureau (Adèle), 361.
Burger (Emma), 324, 365. Burnby (Lady), 250. Burnier, 773, 774.
Burot, 222. Burns, 267, 277. Burt, 105. Burton (Lady), 459. — (J-),
177. — (A.), 569, 570, 612. Buscarlet (Mme), 474. Bute (Marquis
de), 390, 753. Byron (Lord), 88. Byzantios, 274, 275. Cadello, 277.
Caillât, 16. Calderone (L), 41. Campbell (Mm<>), 474. Calmette
(D')> 750. Calt (Capit.), 407. Camus (Mme), 47. Canalletti, 152.
Canius Julius, 270. Cannelle, 122. Capron, 27. Carancini, 671, 672,
695. Cardan (J.), 19. Carleton, 448, 492. Carlotta, 667. Carolath
(Princesse), 496. Cardno, 145. Carpenter, 31/ 34. Carpenter (E.),
390. Carré, 116. — de Montgeron, 21. Carrel (Armand), 454.
Carreras, 488. Carrick, 356. Carrington, 38, 216, 242, 244, 386, 529,
538, 581, 602, 684, 741. Carroll, 711. Cartior, 641. Cascel, 485.
Casimir Périor, 484, 485. Castelwitch (M»° de), 674-678. Catherin,
673. Catherine do Médicis, 225. Caubin, 283, 284. Cauchy, 269.
Cavalcante (S.), 395. Cecchini, 695. César, 17. Chambard, 36.
Chambers (Anna), 182. Chapronière, 704. Charcof, 36, 118, 352,
353. Charmide, 17. Charpignon, 139. Charrier (R.), 745. Chasles, 10.
Chaumontet, 773. Chaves, 353. Chazarain, 121. Cheiro, 740.
Chenovath, 184, 470. Chiaia (Cad.-E.), 529, 530. Chevalon, 209.
Cheves (M°>»), 264. Chevreul, 31, 206, 280, 282, 283, 289, 354,
355. Chevreuil, 41, 771. Child, (Lydia), 174. Chomel (D'), 143.
Chopin, 480. Chowrin, 230, 231, 232, 233. Christine (l'admirable),
692. Christman, 367. Christmas, 438. Cicéron, 18, 19, 440, 441, 575,
602. Ciompari, 194. Claparède, 96, 297-301. Clarke (D'), 388. —
391. Claudet (Mm«), 740. Claudine, 433. Claughton, 337, 338.
Clawson, 568. Clément XIV, 701. Clericus, 340. Cloquet, 32, 324.
Coates (J.), 218. Cobacker (Bl.), 279. Coghill (Colonel), 492. Cohen
(D' L.), 464. Coleman (E.), 577. Collemann (A.), 681. Colley, 591,
682, 683. CollyerM-), 368.
 798 INDEX ALPHABETIQUE DES NOMS Goniar (D')> 136
Conan-Doyle, 177, 445, 491 , 492, 617, 779. Conil, 369. Connell,
367. Gonstable, 273. Contamine, 412. Gook (Florence), 34, 39, 42,
43, 44, 48, 51, 565, 584, 588, 590, 595, 604, 605, 608, 630 633,
655, 695. Gooto (M—), 426. Cooper (Dr), 473. Coover (Ed.), 112,
113. Coppinger, 428. Corneille (D'P.), 549. Cordier (N.), 148,149.
Cornis (l>). 401. Gornillier, 187, 188, 189. Coromélas, 274. Corrales
(Ofélia), 617, 678, 679, 688. Cotté, 368. Conesdon (M™0), 194.
Couesnon (Mm°), 368. Courtier, 274, 529, 538, 562, 628, 633, 634.
Cowes, 339, 542, 577. Cox (Sergent), 34. — (M-»), 369. — (Ed.),
432, 526. Craigie (Colonel), 370. Crawford, 550, 551, 552, 559, 563,
564, 565, 568, 598, 627. Cready (Me), 342. Creery, 568. Crémieux
(G.), 270, 382. Crépieux-Jamin, 228. Grookes (Sir William), 6, 13,
16, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 51, 208, 256, 275, 522527, 572, 594,
596, 597, 628-633, 582, 589, 592, 596, 597, 599, 604, 605, 608,
618, 628-633, 655, 678, 759, 761, 765, 784. Cumberland, 31, 79.
Curie (P.), 529, 679. Curie (M««), 529, 633, 634. Curtius Rufus, 19.
Cybulski, 544. Cyriax, 694. Dale Owon, 686, 702, 716. Dallas
(M»>«), 190, 209. Damiani, 276, 529, 604. Darget, 185, 613, 709.
Dariex, 37, 145, 375, 529, 535, 539, 540, 548, 549, 592. Darwin
(Dh.), 33, 390. Davane, 622. Davenport, 44, 590. Davereux, 749.
Davey, 573. Davies, 570. Daviso, 178. Day (Fr.), 169. Dear (M»»),
731. Decréquy (D1), 642, 649. Dee, 247 Deinhard, 650. Delaage,
143. Delanne (G.), 41, 113, 125, 185, 219, 276-279, 574, 596, 604,
642-648, 701, 709, 731-733. Deleuze, 23, 35, 118. Delorme, 484.
Demadrille, 642, 649, 650. Demay (Ch.), 372, 373. Dencausse, 449.
Denis (L.), 41. Dennys, 434. Denton, 217,218. Depler, 301. Derter,
745. Derudder, 132. Desbarolles, 226. Desbeaux, 488. Descartes,
603. Descormiers, 218. Desmoulin (F.), 96. Dessoir, 23, 112, 275,
560, 561, 562. Deupès, 371,372. Devienne, 375. Dexter, 30. Dhière,
693. Dickens, 92, 93, 257, 258, 490. Dickinson, 372, 416. Didelot,
276. Didier (Alexis). Dombrain, 356. Dominique (Saint), 692. Donato,
120. Done, 322, 323, 376. Donnell (O.), 719, 720. Dontaz, 372.
Dorât (M««). 521. Dorian (Tola), 187. Draga, 202-205, Drakoulès,
243. Dresser, 133. Drubay, 641. Ducane (L.), 730. Duchâtel, 218,
297, 465. Duck, 373. Dudlay (M°>» A.), 341, 455. Dul'aux
(Ilermance), 91, 92. Dufay, 141,142, 221. Dufilhol, 472. Dulley, 472.
Dumas (Aloxandre), 144. Dunraven (Lord), 52, 383, 523, 619.
DuPotet, 74, 127, 185. Dupré (J.), 493. Du Prel (C), 41.
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